MinSORTING: An Excel® worksheet for modelling mineral grain-size distribution in sediments, with application to detrital geochronology and provenance studies

MinSORTING is an Excel® spreadsheet devised to model mineral distributions in different size-classes within sediment samples and maximize mineral recovery during separation procedures for single-grain analysis. It is based on the physical laws of settling by tractive currents, both in water and air, applied to the different minerals in silt to sand-sized terrigenous sediments. Input values are: (i) grain size and sorting, (ii) depositional medium (seawater, freshwater or air), (iii) sediment composition (selected from a range of tectonic settings). The software's output includes the distribution of 27 different detrital components contained in sediments in size intervals of 0.25, 0.5, or 1 phi. Researchers can thus select the most appropriate size window for their own analyses and obtain valuable information on the amount of minerals lost in finer and coarser grain-size classes, allowing to accurately constrain the significance of their results.