Sediment budget of cratons: insights from West Africa over the Cenozoic

Abstract:

The sediment load of rivers constitutes the material that builds the stratigraphic successions found from continental margins to the deep ocean. Measure of this flux is relevant to understanding continental controls on denudation, riverine transport and basin filling. An increasing number of sediment yield measures is available but whether these modern values can be extrapolated at geological timescales for large watersheds is still questioned. One reason is the lack of long-term data. Here, we present a sediment budget for Sub-Saharan West Africa over the Cenozoic to compare with the modern rates. The denudation of this cratonic area is constrained using three regional lateritic paleo-landsurfaces that formed during periods of enhanced weathering since the Paleocene-Eocene greenhouse peak. The 3D interpolation of these surfaces allowed building three successive denudation maps for the 45-24, 24-11 and 11-0 Ma intervals together with reconstructions of the paleo-drainage. The regional distribution of erosion suggests the influence of lithospheric deformation, concentrated around a southern marginal upwarp and eastern hotspot swells. The export of large-scale drainages was calculated by converting denudated volumes into sediment fluxes using the porosity and density of lateritic regolith. Exported volumes calculated for the Niger watershed fall within the same range as the Cenozoic clastic accumulations of the Niger delta. Comparisons also show that modern fluxes can be an order of magnitude above the long-term fluxes for moderately large watersheds but that modern and long-term yields are similar for the largest watersheds (e.g. Niger, Volta, Senegal). These results suggest that the export of very large cratonic watersheds is independent of the measurement timescale and that their modern yields can be extrapolated at long-timescale. Finally, it allows assessing the relative contribution of cratons, i.e. non-active orogenic areas, to the global sediment budgets at geological timescales.