Daan Beelen, Christopher Aiden-Lee Jackson , Stefano Patruno, David Hodgson, João Trabucho Alexandre

The geometry of basin margin strata documents changes in water depth, slope steepness, and sedimentary facies distributions. Their stacking patterns are widely used to define shelf-edge trajectories, which reflect long-term variations in sediment supply and relative sea level change. Here, we present a new method to reconstruct the geometries and trajectories of clinoform-bearing basin￾margin successions. Our sequential decompaction technique explicitly accounts for down-dip lithology
variations, which are inherent to basin-margin stratigraphy. Our case studies show that preferential compaction of distal, fine-grained foresets and bottomsets results in a vertical extension of basin margin strata and a basinward rotation of the original shelf-edge trajectory. We discuss the implications these effects have for sea level reconstructions and for predicting the timing of sediment transfer to the basin
floor.