As a bonus, squishy lake-edge sediments are just the things for recording the tracks of passing animals.
The rocks contain very fine-grained sediments but are cut through with pale veins of what could be calcium sulphate.
To replace earlier finds, oil companies moved offshore, where rivers have been depositing petroleum-forming sediments for millions of years.
The result was an alteration in the flows to water mains, which stirred up naturally-occurring sediments within the system.
Before pollution and over harvesting, oyster reefs protected coastlines in estuaries by stabilizing sediments and softening wave impacts near shorelines.
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Deltas like the one at Eberswalde, with their silty, gently deposited sediments, are often the best places to preserve organic remains.
The John Klein slabs contain very fine-grained sediments but are cut through with pale veins of what could be calcium sulphate.
Sediments drilled from beneath the Dead Sea reveal that this most remarkable of water bodies all but disappeared 120, 000 years ago.
The Oxford team reasoned that if this perturbation was so great, it ought to be evident in the sediments of Lake Malawi.
That was where the motley sediments of ancient Mars were succeeded by layer upon unvarying layer of brownish rock, two miles high.
There was an alluvial fan at the base of the mountain, for instance, that had some of the same sediments as Eberswalde.
All over the world, since the mid-20th Century, sediments have become measurably enriched in 'reactive' nitrogen - nitrogen oxides and ammonium compounds.
That, combined with wet weather that washed sediments into the bay the following year, has contributed to the declines, the researchers said.
Having shown that climatic or environmental events were improbable explanations, Ms Hellawell and her colleagues started analysing the sediments in more detail.
Even in Earth rocks where we know sediments have been laid down in proximity to biology, we still frequently find no organic traces.
But in some areas, sediments are so polluted with toxic chemicals, such as mercury, that the mud must be stored in a dump.
The site of the Acheulian tools was found among sediments that were confirmed by dating methods to be about 1.76 million years old.
Tens of metres of sediments have been drilled to retrieve cores, and it these recordings of past times that Dr Lane and colleagues examined.
The climate record -- stretching back more than 750, 000 years -- can be read in the sediments and ice layers from Asia to Greenland.
Alex Wolfe and colleagues have sampled and chemically analysed the layers of sediments at the bottom of lakes in high alpine zones and the Arctic.
Back on shore, Gabriel Kasozi, now of the Makerere University of Kampala in Uganda, studied the sediments in coastal areas of Louisiana after the disaster.
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These proxies include coral, ice cores, mineral deposits in caves, lake and ocean sediments, as well as a few historical records like grape harvest dates.
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In addition, the scientifically recognized temperature proxy data from tree rings, ice cores, lake and ocean sediments, and stalagmites also show no warming since 1940.
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The turbulent flow of water creates undulations in the bed sediments - a series of ripples or dunes that slowly migrate in the direction of the water current.
This region of lower ground contains older sediments, but ones that still reflect conditions where a lot of water must have been present at some point.
His group is not the first to use such data (ice cores, fossils, marine sediments and the like) to probe the climate's sensitivity to carbon dioxide.
Such helium was found inside fullerenes in well-studied, clay sediments that contain extraterrestrial iridium and highly shocked minerals resulting from an asteroid impact 65 million years ago.
But the investigation finds no changes in the composition of the sediments that would indicate a significant dip in temperatures in East Africa concurrent with the Toba eruption.
But Dongye Zhao from Auburn University in the US said that the dispersants also caused sediments to absorb more of the harmful compounds, lengthening their effects on the environment.
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Evidence for past supernovae is thin on the ground, although in 1999 German researchers found traces of iron-60 in south Pacific sediments ( Physical Review Letters, vol 83, p 18).
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