Keppel Bay in central Queensland, Australia, contains beach ridges preserving a sediment accumulation record from the historical period back to the middle Holocene. The dataset, from Geoscience Australia, includes optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages indicating periods of rapid progradation approximately 1500, 1000, 450, and 230 years before present. It estimates the beach-ridge strandplain traps the equivalent of 79% of the estimated long-term average annual bedload of the Fitzroy River deposited in the bay.
Use Cases
- Modeling sediment provenance and transport based on trace-element composition changes linked to catchment erosion.
- Analyzing climate variability impacts on coastal progradation rates using OSL-dated beach ridge units.
- Investigating the influence of historical land-clearing on sediment supply by comparing young ridge composition with older units.
- Quantifying long-term sediment budgets by comparing strandplain sediment mass with estimated river bedload.
Strengths
- Includes optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages pinpointing deposition periods at approximately 1500, 1000, 450, and 230 years BP.
- Provides a quantitative estimate that the strandplain traps the equivalent of 79% of the estimated long-term average annual river bedload.
- Links sediment composition changes to specific catchment processes like vegetation clearing and erosion from basaltic soils.
Limitations
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
- Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for quantitative modeling.
- Data may reflect geographic and temporal bias inherent to the single-site, Holocene-to-modern study.
Provenance
- Source
- Geoscience Australia Data
- Collection Method
- Field sampling and analysis of beach ridge sediments, including optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating and trace-element composition analysis.
- Time Range
- Middle Holocene to present, with specific OSL ages from <100 to ~1500 years before present.
- Freshness
- Last updated 2026-04-30 13:34:17.260493; freshness should be verified.
- Geography
- Keppel Bay, central Queensland, Australia, and the Fitzroy River catchment.