Tracking paleodrainage in pleistocene foreland basins

Foreland basins are comprehensive stratigraphic archives, from which many details of the tectonic history of associated orogens can potentially be retrieved by quantitative provenance analysis of sedimentary sequences. Because of complex basin‐fill architecture, however, provenance diagnoses often remain ambiguous. Trends in sediment composition cannot be safely interpreted as documenting paleotectonic or paleoclimatic changes whenever paleodrainage shifts represent an equally reasonable alternative. Understanding drainage patterns is thus a fundamental step in correctly unraveling tectonic and climatic events that punctuate the erosional evolution of mountain belts. In this study, we focus on well‐studied Quaternary subsurface successions of the Po Plain to illustrate a quantitative method of paleodrainage analysis. This method, based on high‐resolution petrographic and heavy‐mineral data from modern and Pleistocene sands, allowed us to objectively reconstruct the drainage changes of Po River tributaries triggered by major Alpine glaciations in the past million years.