Over geologic time, continental shelves are repeatedly flooded and exposed by relative rises and falls in sea level. As such, shelves are shaped and reshaped by subaerial, coastal, and submarine processes. While these processes can be studied today, the temporal and spatial scales over which shelf morphology and strata are created are beyond the realm of direct observation. The incompleteness of the stratigraphic record and of records of past environments complicates matters even further for it riddles geologic interpretations of strata with uncertainties about what formed when, where, why, and how.

Pratson, L., J. Swenson, A. Kettner, J. Fedele, G. Postma, A. Niedoroda, C. Friedrichs, J.P.M. Syvitski, C. Paola, M. Steckler, E. Hutton, C. Reed, M. Van Dijk, and H. Das. 2004. Modeling continental shelf formation in the Adriatic Sea and elsewhere. Oceanography 17(4):118–131, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2004.09.

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