Sediment growth and aging as Markov chains.

Preservation of sediments as a function of their geologic age can be described by stochastic models for the following cases: 1) fixed sediment mass with constant probabilities of erosion and preservation; 2) fixed sediment mass with erosion and preservation probabilities that vary with geologic age; and 3) growing sediment mass with constant probabilities of erosion, preservation, and removal from the sedimentary cycle. A general characteristic of the stochastic models is that for any mass-age distribution of sediments when the mass decreased with an increasing geologic age, there always exist sets of preservation and erosion probablities that describe the process of sediment aging.-from Authors