External forcings on turbidity currents during the late Quaternary: Insights from tectonic, eustatic, and climatic interactions

Turbidity currents represent a key mechanism for sediment transport on continental margins, fundamentally shaping deep-marine depositional systems and preserving valuable records of paleoenvironmental change. This review systematically evaluates the external forcing factors that have governed turbidity current activity during the late Quaternary, with a specific focus on tectonic processes, sea-level fluctuations, and climatic variability. Tectonically, large earthquakes and explosive volcanic eruptions serve as direct triggers for submarine slope failures or the rapid input of volcaniclastic material, initiating high-energy turbidity flows that are ultimately preserved as extensive turbidite sequences along both active and passive continental margins. Sea-level oscillations regulate sediment routing by controlling the connectivity between terrestrial sediment sources and deep-sea sinks. While lowstands typically enhance sediment bypass to the slope, emerging evidence demonstrates that highstand turbidity currents are also widespread under conditions of high sediment supply, narrow shelves, or direct delta-canyon linkages. In addition to sea-level fluctuations, climatic-connected controls, such as monsoonal precipitation, glacial meltwater discharge, and aeolian dust input, frequently override eustatic effects and can generate turbidity currents even during transgressive or highstand periods. By integrating sedimentological, stratigraphic, geophysical, and geochemical datasets from a range of tectonic and climatic settings, this review highlights the complex and non-linear interactions among external controls that modulate turbidity current initiation, behavior, and deposition. These insights have significant implications for interpreting turbidite archives, reconstructing past Earth surface processes, and refining source-to-sink processes in dynamic margin systems.