Example Stratigraphic Architecture"
In StratPal: Stratigraphic Paleobiology Modeling Pipelines

Introduction

library(StratPal)

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>"
)

This vignette provides an overview over the example stratigraphic architecture provided with the StratPal package.

Stratigraphic Context

The example data is taken from a synthetic carbonate platform simulated using CarboKitten.jl (Hidding et al. 2025). It emulates scenario A from Hohmann et al (2024), which was originally simulated in CarboCAT (Burgess 2013), and is characterized by a sinusoidal sea level curve and 2 long (> 0.5 Myr) hiatuses over the 2 Myr duration of the run.

Dataset structure

The structure of the dataset is explained on the help pages, which is available using

?scenarioA

Simulation settings

The full code to generate simulation data and visualizations is available here. The simulation was run over 2 Myr at steps of 1 kyr, with data extracted at 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 km from shore in the middle of the simulated platform. Three carbonate factories were used: euphotic, oligophotic, and aphotic:

knitr::include_graphics("platform_production_curve.png")

The eustatic sea level curve is a combination of third and fifth order changes with an amplitude of 20 and 2 m and a period of 1 and 0.112 Myr:

plot(x = scenarioA$t_myr, 
     y = scenarioA$sl_m,
     xlab = "Time [Myr]",
     ylab = "Sea level [m]",
     main = "Eustatic Sea Level",
     type = "l")

For users interested in more details, we recommend inspecting the simulation source code (written in Julia).

Platform visualization

knitr::include_graphics("platform_profile.png")

knitr::include_graphics("platform_wheeler_diagram.png")

References

Hidding, Johan, Jarochowska, Emilia, Hohmann, Niklas, Liu, Xianyi Burgess, Peter and Spreeuw, Hanno: "CarboKitten.jl – an open source toolkit for carbonate stratigraphic modeling." Preprint. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4561
Burgess, Peter. 2013. "CarboCAT: A cellular automata model of heterogeneous carbonate strata." Computers & Geosciences. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cageo.2011.08.026.
Hohmann, Niklas; Koelewijn, Joël R.; Burgess, Peter; Jarochowska, Emilia. 2024. "Identification of the mode of evolution in incomplete carbonate successions." BMC Ecology and Evolution 24, 113. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-024-02287-2.