Petrographic composition and heavy minerals in modern river sand: A global database

Abstract

In the case of modern river sediments, source rocks, tectonic setting, and climatic and geomorphological conditions are fully known, diagenetic effects are by definition none, and physical and chemical processes during erosion, transport, and deposition can be investigated directly in any required detail. Their study thus provides the fundamental information needed to understand the impact of various controls on sediment generation and sediment routing systems in diverse geological settings. With the growing interest in source‐to‐sink sedimentary systems for economic purposes, researchers have focused more and more on modern environments, producing an ever‐increasing amount of compositional data on river sediments. To better integrate and utilize these large datasets, we systematically compiled a global database of 4,208 fluvial sediment samples compiled from 100 published papers, book chapters, and dissertations and included 3,747 petrographic and 1,943 heavy‐mineral analyses. The analysed samples are mostly located in Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America, with fewer examples from North America and Oceania. Each sample is complemented by metadata describing references, river name, geographic location, sampling date, analytical method, and grain size, so that samples can be grouped and filtered to meet different needs including comparison with other datasets.