Linking Surface Morphological Change to Subsurface Fluvial Architecture: What Imprints do big Floods Leave?

Ideas concerning the origin of alluvial deposits and their paleoenvironmental interpretation have usually resulted in two schools of thought: that such deposits are either the result of ordinary 'day-to-day' processes that acted uniformly through time, or that they are related to rare events that had a disproportionate effect on erosion and deposition rates. Despite the long running debate of gradualism and catastrophism within the Earth Sciences, there is surprisingly little quantitative data to assess what magnitude of event is represented in many fluvial sequences. This paper reports results of a unique natural 'experiment' where surface (digital elevation models obtained from digital photogrammetry) and subsurface (ground penetrating radar, GPR) data were taken immediately prior to, and after, a large (1 in 40 year) flood event that occurred in 2005 on the sand-bed, braided South Saskatchewan River, Canada. We surveyed several reaches of the river both before and after this major flood event, and collected repeat aerial surveys of the entire channel, as well as GPR surveys along identical survey lines. This allows us to examine the morphological change in the channel form during this flood, quantify the probability distributions of bed heights within the channels, and assess the amount of erosion and/or deposition represented within the subsurface architecture. Results indicate that although this high-magnitude flood had a marked geomorphic impact, the style and scale of both scour and deposition were the same as that measured during lower-magnitude, annual, floods. Hence, rather than being a reflection of either frequent or rare events, alluvial deposits in the South Saskatchewan contain the record of both but these different scale events may be virtually indistinguishable in the subsurface alluvial architecture.