Effect of bed clay on surface water-wave reconstruction from ripples

Wave ripples can provide valuable information on their formative hydrodynamic conditions in past subaqueous environments by inverting dimension predictors. However, these inversions do not usually take the mixed non-cohesive/cohesive nature of sediment beds into account. Recent experiments involving sand–kaolinite mixtures have demonstrated that wave-ripple dimensions and the threshold of motion are affected by bed clay content. Here, a clean-sand method to determine wave climate from orbital ripple wavelength has been adapted to include the effect of clay and a consistent shear-stress threshold parameterisation. From present-day examples with known wave conditions, the results show that the largest clay effect occurs for coarse sand with median grain diameters over 0.45 mm. For a 7.4% volumetric clay concentration, the range of possible water-surface wavelengths and water depths can be reduced significantly, by factors of three and four compared to clean sand, indicating that neglecting clay when present will underestimate the wave climate.