What Controls Ooid Grain Size?

Abstract:

Ooids are subspherical chemical sand grains composed of concentric layers of CaCO₃ surrounding a central nucleus. These grains represent a common mode of carbonate sedimentation, making them potentially powerful proxies for paleoenvironmental conditions, provided a mechanistic understanding of the physical, chemical, and perhaps biological conditions necessary for their formation. At a basic level, growth of an ooid reflects that precipitation has outpaced abrasion over the ooid’s lifetime. We can describe change in ooid size over time (net growth rate) mechanistically as the sum of a growth rate (the rate of carbonate precipitation on the ooid surface) and an abrasion rate (the rate of removal of material through grain-grain and grain-bed collisions). Previous studies have addressed the growth rate, investigating the extent to which microbial activity affects and/or controls carbonate precipitation on ooid surfaces, and the net growth rate, using stepwise acid digestion and radiocarbon dating to determine the ages of cortical layers. We focused on the abrasion rate and designed an experimental study to measure abrasion rates of ooids as a function of grain size and sediment transport stage. Preliminary experiments with medium-sand-sized ooids at a Rouse number of ~1.2 yielded an abrasion rate of 0.04 g/hr (or ~40 ng/ooid/hr), which is four orders of magnitude greater than the fastest net growth rates reported in the recent high resolution ooid cortex radiocarbon dating study by Beaupre et al. (2015). This result requires that either: 1) ooids are essentially not moving and therefore not being abraded or 2) precipitation rates are also much more rapid than the net growth rates estimated by incremental radiocarbon dating. The former constraint is inconsistent with field observations that most marine ooids occur in high energy shoal environments, both in modern examples and in the rock record. Precipitation rates must therefore also be relatively rapid compared with net growth rates in order to offset the effects of abrasion. This disparity in magnitude between abrasion/precipitation rates and net growth rate implies that ooids spend much of their lifetime near a dynamic equilibrium in ooid size, perhaps explaining why ooid populations tend to be unimodal with relatively narrow distributions of grain size.