Controls on River Migration Rates in Ancient Deposits and Modern Rivers Through the Lens of Stratigraphy

Sedimentary deposits provide a valuable record of past geological events, offering insights into the behavior of rivers across diverse climatic and environmental contexts throughout history. River dynamics and sedimentation help define depositional patterns that affect organic carbon retention, and aquifer quality. The preservation of river deposits in the stratigraphic record offers an opportunity to explore what depositional and environmental conditions drive river migration and avulsion. This preservation pattern can be projected by studying river dynamics and migration. Several variables such as sediment flux, discharge, curvature, width, and vegetation influence river migration rate. Observation of modern rivers can give us much more insight on how these parameters govern migration rates and other river movement processes such as cutoffs, and avulsion. Besides, different migration rates and processes can influence the subsurface architecture distinctively, which can be predictable for a longer timeframe and even can be measured in the ancient record as well.

To observe the modern rivers, and determine their migration rates, and processes multiple centerline-based variables have been computed according to the method of Schwenk et al. (2017), which will be tested against the migration rate to see the existence of any quasilinear or other statistical relationship. Following Sylvester et al. (2019), we generated basic kinematic numerical models of meandering and examined synthetic cross-sections for varied migration rates with numerous iterations, and correlation and validation will be done by taking field measurements. This work will reconstruct paleo-morphodynamics and predict ancient fluvial deposit subsurface heterogeneity.