Past and Future Sedimentary Preservation

When using the present as a key to the past and when projecting processes to products, geologists are forced to bridge time scales. Similar bridging is needed when projecting geological futures. Especially insight in past preservation helps to structure such future projections. In sedimentary lowlands such as the Netherlands, the time scales at which preservation is decided stretch longer (10^2-10^6 years) than time scales over which deposition is controlled (10-10^4 years). This links to classic topics: e.g. whether common or rare events preserve most (over 10 to 10^3 years), and whether base-level oscillation or varying sediment supply controls basin fill architecture most (over 10^3 to 10^6 years). Digital mapping, dating, extreme event inventorying, sediment budgeting, and climate, sea-level and tectonic studies in the Netherlands together allow to quantify how preservation worked out over each of the time scales. Where in the past statements on preservation were qualitative and strongly dependent on believes in forcings, we can now provide empirical data of extensive coverage to test preservation theories spatially. Such work has started at the resolution and time scales offered by the Holocene of the Netherlands, and stretches to the Pleistocene of the North Sea Basin.