Unravelling mixed sediment signals in the floodplains of the Rhine catchment using end member modelling of grain size distributions

Abstract

During sediment transport downstream, river systems mix sediments from different parts of their catchments. During deposition, sediments are often unmixed again in different depositional environments (facies). During fluvial transport, between erosion and deposition of sediment, the sediment is sorted too. A commonly observed phenomenon is downstream fining (Frings, 2007), which is the tendency for bed sediments of many rivers to become finer downstream. All processes mentioned above make that fluvial sediment, and thus the fluvial record, is spatially variable.