Terrigenous sediment is a clastic sedimentary material derived primarily from the mechanical and chemical weathering of continental crustal rocks and transported into marine, lacustrine, or marginal environments by rivers, wind, glaciers, or coastal erosion. It consists predominantly of siliciclastic components such as quartz, feldspar, lithic fragments, and clay minerals, often accompanied by heavy minerals and minor authigenic phases. Terrigenous sediments influence basin stratigraphy, sedimentary facies, and geochemical cycles by diluting biogenic and authigenic components, providing detrital nutrients and trace metals, and recording provenance, paleoclimate, and tectonic signatures through their grain-size distributions, mineralogy, and isotopic compositions.
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