Highlights—Grain Size Related to Shoreface Setting

Granulometric characterization is a fundamental tool for sedimentologic analyses, and ideally provides unique insight into sedimentary dynamics. Here, Barusseau and Braud show that many sands of the recent deposits of the shoreface of the Golfe du Lion (Mediterranean Sea, France) represent mixtures of four sediment types. Each sediment type is interpreted to be distinct, but that these can be mixed to create asymmetric grain size distributions. Areas with exclusive or dominant transport processes include mixtures that tend toward a log-normal grain-size distribution. These findings provide insights into possible mechanisms underlying the deposition of sediments in the coastal environments, results that may have use in paleogeographic reconstructions of the coastal zone and basin borders in geologic analogs.

Grain-size components as markers of origin and depositional processes in the coastal zone of the Golfe du Lion (Mediterranean Sea, France) by J. Paul Barusseau and Raphaël Braud