I am a sedimentary petrologist working at the intersection of fundamental Earth science and applied subsurface challenges. My research bridges modern sedimentary systems and deep-time stratigraphy, using quantitative provenance analysis to decode how tectonics, climate, and lithology shape the sedimentary record—and to predict how sedimentary systems will behave under specified boundary conditions. I combine academic research with industry collaboration, having worked across five continents from the Magdalena River to the Namib Sand Sea, from Permian red beds to Holocene deltas. In 2010 I co-founded the Working Group on Sediment Generation; in 2017 I established the School of Sandstone Reservoirs. My goal is to transform sedimentary petrology from a descriptive discipline into a genuinely predictive science.

This capacity to reconstruct both surface dynamics and crustal evolution places sedimentary petrology at a unique interface. Accretionary and unroofing processes—the progressive exhumation of deeper structural levels during orogenesis—are recorded in systematic changes in sediment composition through time. Detrital geochronology, thermochronology, and heavy mineral assemblages preserve the thermal and metamorphic histories of source terranes that have long since been eroded away. The sedimentary record thus serves as an archive of lithospheric evolution, providing constraints on processes operating at depths and timescales inaccessible through direct observation.

By quantifying orogen-basin relationships, exhumation pathways, sediment production rates, transport mechanisms, depositional facies, and diagenetic evolution, sedimentary petrology enables us to reconstruct tectonic and climatic signals in the geological record while simultaneously providing process-based frameworks for anticipating subsurface reservoir behaviour, landscape response to climate change, and environmental system trajectories.

My research vision is to develop predictive models of sedimentary systems that advance basic geoscientific knowledge while addressing societal challenges in climate change research, energy transition, and environmental sustainability. The future of geosciences lies in the deep integration of fundamental and applied research—and sedimentary petrology, by its nature, sits at exactly this interface.

My research integrates Sediment Routing Systems (SRS) and Sediment Generation (SG) through Quantitative Provenance Analysis (QPA). This integration reflects a core insight of modern sedimentary petrology: that the composition of a sediment is not merely a fingerprint of its source, but a quantitative record of the interplay among tectonics, climate, and lithology throughout the entire source-to-sink pathway—and, critically, an archive of the crustal evolution of the source terrane itself.

Sediment Routing Systems connect all steps of the sediment journey from erosion through transfer to final deposition. Sediment Generation focuses on quantifying sediment production (Qs) from known parent rocks and predicting the compositional-textural properties of erosional products under given boundary conditions. But the source is not static: as orogens are uplifted and eroded, progressively deeper structural levels are exposed, and the sedimentary record captures this unroofing history—from supracrustal cover sequences through upper-crustal granitoids to mid-crustal metamorphic complexes. The central challenge: How can we use the composition and texture of sediments to quantify both surface processes and deeper crustal evolution—and how can this knowledge be inverted to reconstruct Earth history or projected forward to predict system behaviour?

From Composition to Process

Traditional provenance analysis uses sediment composition to reconstruct eroded terrains through inverse modelling—working backwards from observed compositions to infer source characteristics. My work advances this by developing approaches that use compositional data to quantify the relative impacts of controlling factors on sediment generation and flux. This shift from qualitative interpretation to quantitative modelling enables:

• Endmember mixing models that disentangle the impacts of lithological erodibility, sand generation potential, and structural sediment connectivity (the geomorphic coupling between hillslopes and channel outlets) on observed sediment compositions
• Forward sediment flux models that predict Qs by integrating plate modelling, structural kinematics, paleodrainage reconstructions, and global circulation models—with results validated against compositional signatures in modern analogues
• Multi-proxy analytical workflows that extract complementary information from different compositional and textural parameters: framework petrography records lithological proportions and weathering intensity; heavy minerals preserve signatures of specific source lithologies and metamorphic grades; single-grain geochemistry fingerprints individual plutons or metamorphic terranes; detrital geochronology constrains source ages and magmatic episodes; and low-temperature thermochronology tracks exhumation pathways and unroofing histories, revealing the progressive exposure of deeper crustal levels through time

The power of sedimentary petrology lies in this capacity to integrate multiple information streams—each recording different aspects of the source-to-sink system—into coherent, quantitative reconstructions that constrain both what happened and why.

Applications Across Timescales

I apply these approaches to both modern sedimentary systems and deep-time stratigraphy. Modern systems allow us to calibrate compositional responses to known forcing; ancient systems test whether these relationships hold under different boundary conditions and reveal how signals propagate—or are buffered, shredded, and lost—through sediment cascades into the geological record:

• Quantifying anthropic impacts: In the Magdalena River (Colombia)—one of the world’s top-10 rivers by sediment load—we developed endmember mixing models demonstrating that lithological erodibility enhances sediment generation from sedimentary rocks by up to 40%, while low structural connectivity reduces flux from metamorphic terrains by up to 60% (Liedel et al., 2024a; 2024b). These quantitative constraints enable separation of natural variability from human-induced modifications
• Transient landscapes: Work on the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta—Earth’s highest coastal range—investigates how tectonics, tropical climate, and lithology control sand generation, demonstrating that plutonic rocks constitute the majority of sediment sources despite occupying a minority of the catchment area (Hatzenbühler et al., 2022; Caracciolo et al., 2025)—a finding with implications for understanding differential erosion and sediment budgets globally
• Deep-time reconstruction: DFG-funded research on Permian-Triassic successions in the SE Germanic Basin (Caracciolo et al., 2021; Ravidà et al., 2021a; 2021b; 2023) demonstrates sediment flux increasing from ~2.3 Mt/yr (Middle Permian) to ~7.4 Mt/yr (Early Triassic)—a near-tripling driven by monsoonal intensification and extensional tectonics. Ongoing parallel research in China, USA, and Argentina tests whether these findings represent a global signature of environmental recovery across the Permian-Triassic boundary
• Fluvial-aeolian interactions: The Namib Sand Sea (Caracciolo et al., 2025) traces 11+ Ma of sediment generation, long-distance littoral transport from the Orange River, and aeolian reworking—demonstrating how compositional signatures survive multiple transport and storage cycles

Towards Predictive Sediment Generation Models

A key frontier is developing Sediment Generation Models (SGM) that work forward rather than backward—predicting the amount and compositional-textural properties of sediments that will be produced under specified tectonic, climatic, and lithological boundary conditions. This represents a fundamental shift in the discipline: from sedimentary petrology as a tool for reading Earth history to sedimentary petrology as a predictive science capable of forecasting system behaviour.

Achieving this requires integrating geomorphology, sediment connectivity, erodibility functions, and compositional evolution into unified numerical frameworks—a goal pursued through both modern-system calibration and deep-time validation.

Quaternary sedimentary archives provide high-resolution records of how landscapes and sediment fluxes respond to climatic perturbations—intensified rainfall, increased aridity, glacial-interglacial cycles. Because these archives record system behaviour under boundary conditions similar to present and future Earth, they serve as natural analogues for anticipating landscape response to ongoing climate change.

Sedimentary petrology is essential here because it provides the compositional constraints needed to distinguish between different forcing mechanisms. A change in sediment flux might reflect increased precipitation, tectonic uplift, or vegetation change—but each leaves distinct compositional fingerprints that petrological analysis can identify. By integrating empirical petrological datasets with numerical surface process models, we can reconstruct feedbacks between erosion, transport, and deposition while building predictive analogues for hazard assessment, landscape management, and climate resilience.

Human activities have fundamentally altered sediment production, routing, and deposition over centuries to millennia, but the sedimentary record of these impacts remains poorly quantified. Sedimentary petrology provides the tools to fingerprint anthropogenic modifications by detecting compositional anomalies—shifts in heavy mineral assemblages reflecting mining or land-use change, geochemical signatures of industrial contamination, or textural modifications from river regulation.

Multi-proxy provenance approaches allow us to separate human-induced changes from natural climatic variability, quantify modification magnitudes, and model how anthropogenic pressures interact with natural forcing to alter sedimentary system trajectories. This work advances predictive capacity for the Anthropocene while providing essential knowledge for environmental management and sustainable resource use.

A distinctive strength of sedimentary petrology is its capacity to track sediment evolution from source to burial. The composition and texture that sediments inherit from source areas, acquire during transport, and retain or modify during deposition fundamentally control their subsequent diagenetic pathways. This pre-depositional inheritance determines which minerals will dissolve, which will precipitate as cements, and how porosity-permeability will evolve during burial.

My work demonstrates these linkages: quartz-rich sediments resist mechanical compaction while feldspar- and lithic-rich sediments are prone to chemical alteration; hydraulic sorting during deposition creates systematic compositional variations that predispose early cementation patterns; and provenance-constrained forward modelling can predict reservoir quality in frontier basins lacking well control (Ramírez et al., 2025).

Experimental Diagenesis and Digital Rock Physics

To move from observation to prediction, I supervise an experimental programme simulating early cementation under controlled conditions (Janßen et al., 2024). Laboratory experiments reveal that grain size strongly controls cement distribution: fine-grained layers show ~28% calcite cement versus ~6% in coarse layers under identical chemical conditions—a finding with direct implications for predicting reservoir heterogeneity.

Integration of digital rock physics with experimental diagenesis extends these insights to reservoir scales. By combining microCT imaging with digital sedimentary petrology modelling, we simulate deposition, cementation, and compaction in 3D—predicting porosity, permeability, and mechanical behaviour where physical samples are unavailable. Compaction simulations demonstrate how early cementation stabilises grain frameworks during burial, providing quantitative constraints for reservoir quality prediction.

These experimental and digital results directly inform carbon capture and storage (CCS) applications, constraining mineral trapping mechanisms and injectivity evolution in storage formations.

The integration of quantitative provenance analysis, sediment generation concepts, and diagenetic modelling provides a complete workflow for subsurface prediction—from surface processes controlling sediment input, through depositional architecture, to burial transformation of reservoir properties:

• Hydrocarbon exploration: Pre-depositional controls on reservoir quality demonstrated through Triassic analogues in Spain (Henares et al., 2014; 2016), SE Germany (Ravidà et al., 2021; 2023), aeolian reservoirs in Namibia (Salomon et al., 2024), and forward modelling in the Colombian Caribbean (Ramírez et al., 2025)
• Geothermal energy: Collaboration with Prof. Carlos Vargas demonstrated that geothermal resources could cover 1.1–4.3× residential electricity demand for megacities (Vargas et al., 2022—Nature Communications’ 10 most influential papers, Earth Day 2022). A €500,000 LfU Bavaria project is developing reservoir models for Mesozoic successions in northern Bavaria
• CO₂ storage and hydrogen: Assessing reservoir suitability including fluid-rock interactions, injectivity evolution, and seal integrity—with experimental diagenesis providing quantitative constraints on mineralisation rates

School of Sandstone Reservoirs

In 2017, I founded the School of Sandstone Reservoirs together with Rob Lander and Linda Bonnell (Geocosm LLC); from the second edition we involved Bill Heins (Getech plc UK). This 5-day programme covers the complete workflow from sediment generation through depositional facies to diagenetic modelling—training 130+ professionals across five editions with growing emphasis on energy transition applications.

My research integrates multiple analytical techniques, each extracting different information from the sedimentary record:

• Sedimentary petrography: Quantitative point-counting (Gazzi-Dickinson methodology); framework composition records source lithology proportions and weathering intensity
• Raman spectroscopy: Automated petrographic point-counting, heavy mineral identification, grain varietal analysis, cement characterisation, fluid inclusion analysis
• Heavy mineral analysis: Optical identification plus automated Raman for varietal studies; heavy minerals preserve signatures of specific source lithologies invisible in framework modes
• Detrital geochemistry: Bulk-rock XRF; single-grain LA-ICP-MS for amphibole, pyroxene, garnet, rutile, apatite, titanite, and chrome-spinel—fingerprinting individual source units
• Detrital geochronology: U-Pb dating of zircon, apatite, and rutile for provenance constraints and maximum depositional ages
• Low-temperature thermochronology: Fission-track and (U-Th)/He dating for reconstructing exhumation pathways, erosion rates, and unroofing histories of source terranes—providing direct constraints on the progressive exposure of deeper crustal levels
• Diagenetic analysis: SEM-EDS, cathodoluminescence, fluid inclusions, stable isotopes (δ¹³C, δ¹⁸O)—reconstructing burial and cementation histories
• Digital rock physics: MicroCT integrated with digital sedimentary petrology for 3D simulation of diagenetic processes
• Numerical modelling: Forward diagenetic modelling (Touchstone); sediment flux simulations (BQART); paleodrainage reconstruction