Buffered, incomplete, and shredded: Quantifying impediments for storage of environmental signals in channelized strata

Climate, tectonics, and life influence the flux and caliber of sediment routed across the Earth's surface and into the stratigraphic record. Even after deposition, strata are sensitive to environmental conditions through geochemical and mechanical alteration. This capacity to archive environmental signals allows use of the stratigraphic record to reconstruct the history of Earth and other planetary bodies. However, signals of environmental change face several impediments which combine to reduce the fidelity of the stratigraphic record. Collectively, a suite of deterministic and stochastic process result in buffered, incomplete, and/or shredded stratigraphic signals compared to the true paleo-environmental conditions. These impediments to signal storage are the product of surface dynamics involved in the routing of signals to depocenters and by processes which influence the vertical propagation and coding of signals into subsurface strata, collectively known as the stratigraphic filter. Proper characterization of these impediments to stratigraphic signal storage are therefore necessary for quantitative paleo-environmental reconstructions. Recent work highlights that the magnitudes of these impediments are set by emergent and self-organized length and time scales in landscapes, which are themselves set by regional environmental conditions. Thus, not all depocenters share the same stratigraphic signal storage potential for environmental conditions. This has implications for 1) the subsurface architecture of strata in basins that house important geofluid reservoirs 2) our ability to constrain the response of the Earth system to prior episodes of climate change, which could inform models of ongoing climate change and 3) our ability to constrain magnitude and reoccurrence distributions of paleo-stochastic events like earthquakes from the stratigraphic record. A central challenge we still face in reconstructing paleo-environments from strata is our inability to accurately predict and account for the placement and durations of hiatuses and autogenic products in stratigraphic records. Enhanced characterization of the causes and magnitudes of stochastic processes across all depositional environments will help define uncertainties in our allocation of time in stratigraphy and our environmental reconstructions.