The influence of grain-size analysis methods and sediment mixing on curve shapes and textural parameters: Implications for sediment trend analysis

To this day, deterministic physical models capable of explaining the evolution of grain-size distributions in the course of transport are still lacking. For this reason, various attributes of particle frequency distributions, in particular curve shapes and textural parameters, have for many decades been investigated for potential information about transport behaviour and size-sorting processes of sediments in numerous environments. Such approaches are essentially conceptual and hence rely heavily on the validity of the assumptions on which they are based. A factor which has to date been largely ignored in this context, is the fact that different methods of grain-size analysis (e. g. sieving, laser absorption and diffraction, settling velocity measurements), when applied to the same sample material, produce variable curve shapes, and hence incongruous textural data. This is illustrated by selected examples showing the differences between sieving and settling results, conversion of settling velocities into equivalent settling diameters (psi–phi-transformations), and the influences of particle shape, particle density, and water temperature. It is demonstrated that particle-size distributions are not only method-dependent but also dependent on the adopted post-processing procedure. As a result, only frequency curves generated by the same method and subsequently processed by identical computational procedures can be meaningfully compared. Furthermore, the computation of textural parameters from bi- or multimodal size distributions produces spurious results which are unrelated to the processes leading to the mixing of different size populations frequently observed in nature. In such cases, only the decomposition of such distributions into individual populations and the spatial comparison of such populations makes any sense. Because a physical explanation for the generation of size distributions is lacking, a particular curve shape of a grain-size population has no meaning on its own. Only a systematic comparison of progressively changing curve shapes (and associated textural parameters) of sediments collected on a closely spaced grid can yield data suitable for sediment trend analysis.