Abstract
Lake sediments are a valuable archive to document past flood occurrence and magnitude, and their evolution over centuries to millennia. This information has the potential to greatly improve current flood design and risk assessment approaches, which are hampered by the shortness and scarcity of gauge records. For this reason, paleoflood hydrology from lake sediments received fast-growing attention over the last decade. This allowed an extensive development of experience and methodologies and, thereby, the reconstruction of paleoflood series with increasingly higher accuracy. In this review, we provide up-to-date knowledge on flood sedimentary processes and systems, as well as on state-of-the-art methods for reconstructing and interpreting paleoflood records. We also discuss possible perspectives in the field of paleoflood hydrology from lake sediments by highlighting the remaining challenges. This review intends to guide the research interest in documenting past floods from lake sediments. In particular, we offer here guidance supported by the literature in how: to choose the most appropriate lake in a given region, to find the best suited sedimentary environments to take the cores, to identify flood deposits in the sedimentary sequence, to distinguish them from other instantaneous deposits, and finally, to rigorously interpret the flood chronicle thus produced.
Highlights
River floods are one of the most common natural hazards, frequently causing disasters worldwide, such as the catastrophic floods that occurred in southern France in October 2020 associated with the storm Alex or more recently in a large part of Western Europe in July 2021 [1]
At the turn of the 21st century, scientific efforts were mobilized to reconstruct the first flood series aiming to explore the climate-flood linkages over millennia in New Zealand [13,14], Norway [15], and America [16,17,18] (Figure 1). This inspired the first phase of development in paleoflood hydrology using lake sediments, with studies mostly concentrated in Europe as reviewed by Gilli et al [19] and Schillereff et al [20]
Following a meso, hypo- or homopycnal current, a differential settling of suspended particles develops with respect to the different sizes of grains, which results in a finingupward sequence resembling the upper sequence of a hyperpycnite, i.e., a graded bed (Figure 2B)
Summary
River floods are one of the most common natural hazards, frequently causing disasters worldwide, such as the catastrophic floods that occurred in southern France in October 2020 associated with the storm Alex or more recently in a large part of Western Europe in July 2021 [1]. At the turn of the 21st century, scientific efforts were mobilized to reconstruct the first flood series aiming to explore the climate-flood linkages over millennia in New Zealand [13,14], Norway [15], and America [16,17,18] (Figure 1). This inspired the first phase of development in paleoflood hydrology using lake sediments, with studies mostly concentrated in Europe as reviewed by Gilli et al [19] and Schillereff et al [20]. We discuss possible perspectives in the field of paleoflood hydrology by highlighting the remaining challenges (Section 9)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
