EXPERIMENTS ON DENSITY AND TURBIDITY CURRENTS: III. DEPOSITION OF SEDIMENT

Abstract

Turbidity currents were formed by releasing suspensions of plastic beads (density 1.52, median diameter 0.18 mm) from a lock into a horizontal water-filled flume. Graded beds were formed; the mechanism of deposition was studied by motion photography and the size grading by 150 size analyses.Deposition of sediment took place behind the head even at a time when there was no deceleration of the head: the greater part of the thickness of the bed was deposited during a period of rapid decline in velocity of flow within the body of the current. The mechanism of deposition and the type of grading differed for beds deposited from suspensions with concentrations less than and greater than about 30% by volume. Low concentration suspensions formed 'distribution grading' in which all percentiles showed vertical grading and at least the coarser half of the distribution showed lateral size decrease away from the gate. High concentration suspensions formed 'coarse-tail grading' in which there was almost no lateral size variation and the vertical grading was shown only by the coarsest few percentiles (except at the top of the bed).In high concentration flows the bed did not accumulate layer by layer, as it did in low concentration flows, but was deposited first as an expanded 'quick' layer, which was deformed by shearing and waves produced by the entrained water flowing over the still plastic bed.In both types of graded beds the sorting coefficient (standard deviation of the logarithm of the settling velocity) decreased upward within the bed, and to a lesser extent also laterally away from the gate. The skewness reached a maximum near the center of the bed and became negative at the top.