Interplay between shoreline migration paths, architecture and pinchout distance for siliciclastic shoreline tongues: evidence from the rock record

Facies, geometry and key internal stratigraphic surfaces from eight Cretaceous and Eocene clastic shoreline tongues have been documented. The regressive parts of all the studied tongues represent storm-wave influenced strandplains, deltas or fan-deltas, and the regressive shoreline trajectories varied from descending to ascending. The transgressive parts of the tongues are dominated by either estuarine or coastal-plain deposits. The distance from the coeval, up-dip non-marine deposits to the basinward pinchout of amalgamated shoreface sandstones, measured along depositional dip, is here termed the sand pinchout distance. The study shows that the angle of regressive-to-transgressive turnaround (defined by the angle between the regressive and subsequent transgressive shoreline trajectories) and the process regime during turnaround largely control the sand-pinchout distance. The amount of transgressive erosion can also partly control the pinchout distance, but this parameter was comparable for the different examples presented here. If the type of depositional system at turnaround and the depth of transgressive erosion are constant, small angles of turnaround are associated with large pinchout distances, whereas larger angles of turnaround result in smaller pinchout distances. The model developed allows sand-pinchout distance to be predicted, using data for the landward parts of shoreline tongues. The dataset also shows that steeply rising (aggrading) shoreline trajectories tend to produce more heterolithic sandstone tongues than those formed by lower-angle trajectories.