Publication Date:
2011-11-01
Description:
First of all we would like to thank Dr. Shanmugam for his interest in our study of transport mechanisms of sand in deep-marine environments (Breien et al. 2010). In order to answer the remarks of Shanmugam, we here provide some more details around the experiments, and we specify the intention of the study. The main objective of the experiments presented in our paper was to study transportation and depositional processes in sand-rich slurries run in water, and how these mechanisms respond to changing sand/clay ratios. We find some of the comments of Shanmugam (2011) to be more concentrated on the Bouma sequence and the properties of its divisions Ta–Te, than on the mechanism of sediment transport itself. We do not claim to have produced a complete Bouma sequence (cf. Bouma 1962; Walker 1965; Middleton and Hampton 1973); however, we rather see that our experiments indicate that similar graded-bed deposits may be produced by different transport mechanisms. We show that dense, laminar flows may transport sand through fluidization and incrementally produce sand deposits resembling deposits produced by turbulent turbidity currents. Thus, we regard the process observed in the laboratory as only one out of several mechanisms to transport and deposit clean sand in submarine basins. As part of a Ph.D. program (Breien 2009), 47 debris flow experiments were performed, prepared with five different compositions of varying sand/clay ratio (5, 10, 15, 20, and 25% clay by weight). Content of water and coal...
Print ISSN:
1527-1404
Topics:
Geosciences
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