Relationships Among Sediment Physical and Acoustic Properties in Siliciclastic and Calcareous Sediments

摘要

Since the early 1980s, the authors have collected nearly 800 cores at 69 shallow-water sites around the world (12 calcareous and 57 siliciclastic sites). Siliciclastic sites ranged from soft mud through coarse sand and calcareous sites consisted of molluskan shells, shell hash, carbonate reef debris, and calcareous particles formed by chemical precipitation. The cores were carefully collected by divers from shallow water or sub-sampled from box core samples retrieved from deeper waters. For most sediment samples compressional wave speed and attenuation (at 400 kHz) were measured at 1 cm intervals and sediment physical properties (porosity, bulk density, grain density, and grain size distribution) were determined from 2- cm-thick sections from the same core. Data are typically restricted to the upper 30 cm of sediment. Based on the nearly 4500 common data points resulting from core measurements (3922 siliciclastic and 621 calcareous) regressions were determined among sediment physical and acoustic properties.