Novel luminescence diagnosis of storm deposition across intertidal environments

Natascia Pannozzo; Rachel K Smedley; Andrew J Plater; Iacopo Carnacina; Nicoletta Leonardi

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.161461

Novel luminescence diagnosis of storm deposition across intertidal environments

Sci Total Environ. 2023 Apr 1:867:161461. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.161461. Epub 2023 Jan 7.

Authors

Natascia Pannozzo¹, Rachel K Smedley², Andrew J Plater², Iacopo Carnacina³, Nicoletta Leonardi²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Geography and Planning, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Liverpool, Chatham Street, Liverpool L69 7ZT, UK. Electronic address: sgnpanno@liverpool.ac.uk.
² Department of Geography and Planning, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Liverpool, Chatham Street, Liverpool L69 7ZT, UK.
³ Department of Civil Engineering, School of Civil Engineering and Built Environment, Liverpool John Moores University, Byrom Street, Liverpool L3 3AF, UK.

PMID: 36627000
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.161461

Abstract

Salt marshes provide valuable nature-based, low-cost defences protecting against coastal flooding and erosion. Storm sedimentation can improve the resilience of salt marshes to accelerating rates of sea-level rise, which poses a threat to salt marsh survival worldwide. It is therefore important to be able to accurately detect the frequency of storm activity in longer-term sediment records to quantify how storms contribute to salt marsh resilience. Luminescence is able to infer how long mineral grains were exposed to sunlight prior to burial (e.g., the presence or absence of sediment processing). This study used sediment cores collected from the Ribble Estuary, North West England, to show that luminescence properties of sand-sized K-feldspar grains can diagnose the differential modes of deposition across intertidal settings (i.e., sandflat, mudflat and salt marsh) in longer-term sediment records by detecting the variability in sediment bleaching potential between settings (i.e., sediment exposure to sunlight), thus establishing a framework for the interpretation of luminescence properties of intertidal sediments. It then used modern sediment samples collected before and after a storm event to show how such properties can diagnose changes in sediment processing (i.e., bleaching potential) of mudflat sediments caused by storm activity, despite no changes in sediment composition being recorded by geochemical and particle size distribution analyses. This new luminescence approach can be applied to longer-term sediment records to reveal (and date) changes in the environment of deposition and/or depositional dynamics where there is no obvious stratigraphic evidence of such.

Keywords: Intertidal environments; Luminescence; Mudflats; Salt marshes; Storms.