Coastal River Response to Transgression: A New Look at the Trinity Incised Valley Using Multi-Resolution Seismic Imaging

Modern lowland river systems show transitions in flow characteristics near coastlines that lead to systematic changes in sediment deposition and stratigraphic architecture. Sensitivity of fluvial morphodynamics to base-level has important implications for the prediction and interpretation of fluvial stratigraphy, particularly in deposits formed during periods of relative sealevel rise such as the early Holocene. Improving our understanding of how fluvial stratigraphy is created and preserved in such environments is crucial to paleoenvironmental reconstruction, sand resource estimation, and mapping subsurface facies distributions. A significant challenge has been capturing the spatiotemporal evolution of such systems on long timescales (centuries to millennia), often due to poor data coverage and resolution. Here we investigate the offshore stratigraphic architecture of the Trinity coastal river system, Texas. The paleo-valley is interpreted to have formed during the last lowstand and filled by backstepping fluvial-deltaic and estuarine sediments