UNRAVELLING THE SIGNATURE AND INFLUENCE OF CHANNEL LATERAL MIGRATION ON FLUVIAL DEPOSITS ARCHITECTURE

Sedimentary deposits serve as nature's historical record, highlighting how rivers responded to past climatic and environmental shifts. Natural events like flooding and riverbank erosion present challenges, exacerbated by ever-changing climate and land-use patterns. To improve the subsurface prediction which is crucial for aquifer management, hydrocarbon reservoir connectivity. The present research endeavor is to employ remote sensing data gathered from current rivers and a simple kinematic modelling technique to examine the synergistic effects of channel movements in forming channel-belt deposits that exhibit distinct migration characteristics. We extracted the channel network from Landsat imagery and documented channel lateral mobility rates in a range for single-threaded river systems. Multiple centerline-based variables have been computed according to the method of Schwenk et al. (2017), which were tested against the migration rate to see the existence of any quasi linear or other statistical relationship. We also performed simple kinematic numerical models of meandering, followed by Sylvester et al. (2019), and tested synthetic cross-sections for different migration rates with multiple iterations. The initial results suggest that higher migrating systems have a higher aspect ratio compared to a lower migrating systems. Besides, higher migrating systems have more truncated, less persistent, and less preserved bars whereas lower migrating systems have more preserved and persistent bars. We also inferred that higher migrating systems create a more complex sedimentary architecture than a lower migrating systems. In the future, we will compare patterns of synthetic channel-body architecture to channel-belt architecture from Cretaceous and Paleogene fluvial deposits exposed in the Western United States. The present study will contribute to reconstructing paleo-morphodynamics and anticipate subsurface heterogeneity in ancient fluvial deposits.