Eolian Processes and Sediments

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Abstract

Eolian processes, involving erosion, transportation, and deposition of sand, silt, and clay size sediment by the wind, occur in a variety of environments, including the coastal zone, semi-arid and arid regions (e.g., cold and hot deserts), and agricultural fields in many climates.

Eolian processes are responsible for the production of a variety of erosional landforms that range in scale from individual rocks (ventifacts) to larger and more complex landforms—yardangs, inverted relief, and deflation basins. The wind is responsible for the emission and/or mobilization of dust (mineral aerosols of silt and clay size) and the transport of this material to distant marine and terrestrial areas, where it contributes significantly to soil formation and the nutrient status of a variety of ecosystems. Major depositional landforms comprise deposits of loess (silt) and areas of sand dunes (sand seas and dune fields).

The morphology and sedimentary characteristics of modern and recent desert environments, together with an understanding of the mechanisms by which these systems accumulate and become preserved, provide the basis for the recognition and interpretation of ancient eolian successions, which form both outcropping examples, and which are known only from the subsurface. The stratigraphic architecture of ancient preserved desert sedimentary systems can be summarized in the form of a depositional or facies model.

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  • From the micromorphology of paleoweathering fronts to paleoenvironmental analysis: A case study of the Cretaceous dune fields of Sanfranciscana Basin, Brazil

    2022, Catena
    Citation Excerpt :

    The preservation of inland aeolian systems without the influence of coastal lines, as observed in Sanfranciscana Basin, is a necessary three-stage process (i) construction of an eolian dune-fields; (iii) sediment accumulation to form a succession; and (iii) long-term burial and incorporation into the geological record (Kocurek, 1999). The paleogeography of the sedimentary basin inextricably links the development of this process, tectonic regime, and the atmospheric circulation that directly affects sediment supply (Kocurek and Lancaster, 1999; Mountney and Jagger, 2004; Rodríguez-López et al., 2014; Lancaster and Mountney, 2020). The sediment budget can be positive, neutral, or negative, generating different types of supersurfaces that define a sequence boundary (Kocurek and Havholm, 1993).

Change History: June 2020. N Lancaster and N Mountney have updated the text throughout the article.

This is an update of N. Lancaster, Aeolian Processes, In Reference Module in Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences, Elsevier Inc, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-409548-9.09126-0.

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