SOME EXPERIMENTS ON THE GENESIS OF TURBIDITY CURRENTS

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Abstract
SUMMARY: Turbidity currents are thought to be the agency responsible for the transport and deposition of the sediments known as turbidites. The way in which such currents may arise has been studied experimentally in a glass‐walled tank.The starting point of the experiments was setting the sediments in motion by raising their pore pressure via a shock or vibration. This was achieved in the experiments by striking the metal bottom of the tank with a mallet.The response of a heap of homogeneous sand to such a shock was merely to change the angle of its slope. If a layer of sand was draped over a core of coarser, homogeneous sand, sliding occurred along the plane of permeability contrast and the less coarse sand was deposited at the toe of the slope. When the layer consisted of kaolin, which has a much lower permeability than sand, sliding again took place, but the clay subsequently mixed with the water and was moved along the bottom of the tank in the manner attributed to turbidity currents.An attempt is made to set up a scaling rule for experiments of this type and the consequences that such a rule may have in subsequent study are briefly discussed.

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