Journal article
Sediment residence times in catchments draining to the Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia, inferred by uranium comminution dating
AN Martin, A Dosseto, JH May, JD Jansen, LPJ Kinsley, AR Chivas
Geochimica Et Cosmochimica Acta | PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD | Published : 2019
Abstract
Uranium (U) isotopes are useful for constraining the timescales of weathering and erosion processes. The (234U/238U) activity ratio (parentheses denote activity ratio) of fine-grained detrital minerals is proposed to record the time elapsed since mineral grains were reduced to <63 μm in size, i.e. the comminution age. Comminution ages of river sediments theoretically represent the sum of hillslope storage and alluvial transport/storage in a catchment, i.e. the sediment residence time. Calculation of comminution ages requires knowledge of the (234U/238U) at comminution (i.e. in the parent material at t = 0) and the fraction of 234U recoiled out of sediments (direct-recoil fraction). Furthermo..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
This study was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant (DP0990447) to AD and ARC, Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT0990447) to AD and a University of Wollongong postgraduate scholarship award to ANM. JDJ was supported by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship (Potsdam) and the Danish Council of Independent Research (Aarhus). Three anonymous reviewers and the associate editor (C. Stirling) are thanked for their valuable input that greatly improved the quality of this manuscript. Tim Cohen, Alexandru Codilean and Monika Markowska are thanked for helpful discussions of the manuscript. We thank NASA for providing DEM data from the CGIAR-CSI SRTM 90m Database (http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org), the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (www.bom.gov.au) for climate data, and Geoscience Australia (www.ga.gov.au) for surface geology data.