Real and apparent changes in sediment deposition rates through time

Field measurements show that estimated sediment deposition rate decreases as a power law function of the measurement interval. This apparent decrease in sediment deposition has been attributed to completeness of the sedimentary record; the effect arises because of incorporation of longer hiatuses in deposition as averaging time is increased. We demonstrate that a heavy-tailed distribution of periods of nondeposition (hiatuses) produces this phenomenon and that observed accumulation rate decreases as t(gamma-1), over multiple orders of magnitude, where 0 < gamma