Title:
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Post Mid-Holocene sedimentation of the West Bengal Sundarbans
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The Sundarbans is one of the largest coastal wetland sites in the world that covers an
area of approximately one million hectares in the delta of the Ganges and
Brahmaputra (G-B) rivers located across Bangladesh and India. This thesis sets out
to examine sedimentation taking place in the western, 'abandoned' tidal delta over
the course of the mid-to-late-Holocene epoch, c. last 4000 cal yr BP. This will focus
on investigating the dominant sources and depositional processes through grain-size
distributions, mineralogy, and high-resolution core-scan derived geochemistry of
sediments for provenance and depositional process indicators. By approximately
5000 cal yr BP, the Ganges River had largely abandoned the western delta complex
underlying the present day Indian Sundarbans and migrated eastward towards its
present day course. The western extent of the old G-B delta is now considered to be
undergoing net erosion, at least since the middle ofthe 19th century. This thesis seeks
to test and challenge these assumptions. The results from this thesis suggest that
sedimentary provenance is dominated by a mixed Ganges-Brahmaputra source,
composed mainly of silicate weathering products, with the possibility of greater
Ganges inputs. The depositional environment is characterised by a sedimentary
facies record similar to that of a muddy-tidal flat with a dominant fining-up of the
grain size distributions, capping what may potential sub-tidal ridges. Radiocarbon
results reveal an overarching trend in stratigraphically anachronous dates that are
potentially indicative of fluctuating depositional processes present throughout the
Sundarbans. Sedimentation processes in the Sundarbans appear to reflect the ebband
flood-tidal conditions which may be overprinted by monsoonal variability. A
novel development in the methodological approaches pursued in this research has
been through the compositional data analysis (CoDa) framework. The Sundarbans
may be considered to be a dynamic sedimentary depositional environment that is
under constant flux.
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