Assessing Sediment Flux Evolution for the entire Phanerozoic with Palaeogeography and Palaeoclimate simulations

Deep-time Earth reconstructions, through plate tectonic models and derived products such as palaeogeography provide information about the location of continents, the size of oceans basins and the variations in sea level, hundreds of millions of years back.

Due to the uncertainties in plate tectonic models, and the current limitations of palaeogeographic reconstructions, understanding global scale surface processes such as the erosion of continental areas, the transport of these sediments and their deposition remains a challenge, despite recent advances (Salles et al., 2023a), who calculated the sediment fluxes at the global scale over the last 100 million years with the goSPL software (Salles et al., 2023b).

We present here new sediment fluxes calculations spanning the entire Phanerozoic (44 reconstructions over the last 545 million years). We use high resolution (10x10km) palaeogeographic maps created from the PANALESIS plate tectonic model (Franziskakis et al., 2025), together with climate simulations from the PLASIM model, to calculate the sediment flux at the local (drainage basin) scale following the BQART equation (Syvitski & Milliman, 2007).

We consider scenarios with increasing complexity in parameters, to assess the influence of ice coverage, climate zones and intensity of runoff. Our estimates allow us to better understand the distribution of sediment fluxes at outlet points and their variation in time at the global scale.

 

References:

Franziskakis, F., Vérard, C., Castelltort, S., & Giuliani, G. (2025). Global Quantified Palaeogeographic Maps and Associated Sea-level Variations for the Phanerozoic using the PANALESIS Model [Dataset]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15396265

Salles, T., Husson, L., Rey, P., Mallard, C., Zahirovic, S., Boggiani, B. H., Coltice, N., & Arnould, M. (2023). Hundred million years of landscape dynamics from catchment to global scale. Science, 379(6635), 918–923. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.add2541

Salles, T., Husson, L., Lorcery, M., & Hadler Boggiani, B. (2023). Landscape dynamics and the Phanerozoic diversification of the biosphere. Nature, 624(7990), 115–121. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06777-z

Syvitski, J., & Milliman, J. (2007). Geology, Geography, and Humans Battle for Dominance over the Delivery of Fluvial Sediment to the Coastal Ocean. Journal of Geology, 115(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1086/509246