Three-dimensional anatomy of a Cretaceous river avulsion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract River avulsions are fundamental mechanisms underlying the construction of fluvial stratigraphy. Although avulsions occur in three dimensions (3-D), interpretations of avulsion deposits in the terrestrial stratigraphic record remain largely based on two-dimensional (2-D) lithologic stacking patterns with little spatial context of the avulsion node location. Moreover, though the genesis of intersecting fluvial ridges observed on Mars is commonly attributed to avulsion, little is known about the history or stratigraphic architecture of these intersections nor the duration of the martian fluvial activity they represent. Here, we analyze a fluvial ridge intersection in the Cretaceous Cedar Mountain Formation of eastern Utah, USA, that we interpret to reflect the evolution of a river channel avulsion node exposed in 3-D. Through integration of digital outcrop models and field characterization, we document recognition criteria for avulsion nodes and reconstruct pre-, intra-, and post-avulsion channel evolution at the node, identifying evidence of channel-bed aggradation and pre-avulsion superelevation. Using a new 3-D stratigraphic modeling approach, we simulate the avulsion and analyze the resultant synthetic stratigraphy in parallel with outcrop exposures to link avulsion processes to stratigraphic products. Our results promote recognition and process-based interpretation of ancient river avulsion deposits observed in cross section and plan view on Earth and Mars and constrain the period of fluvial activity represented by the intersection to the order of centuries rather than more significant geologic time, as has been hypothesized previously.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".