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Sediments cored along the southwestern Iberian margin during Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 339 provide constraints on Mediterranean Outflow Water (MOW) circulation patterns from the Pliocene epoch to the present day. After the Strait of Gibraltar opened (5.33 million years ago), a limited volume of MOW entered the Atlantic. Depositional hiatuses indicate erosion by bottom currents related to higher volumes of MOW circulating into the North Atlantic, beginning in the late Pliocene. The hiatuses coincide with regional tectonic events and changes in global thermohaline circulation (THC). This suggests that MOW influenced Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), THC, and climatic shifts by contributing a component of warm, saline water to northern latitudes while in turn being influenced by plate tectonics.

In this paper, we propose a new roundness parameter R, to denote circularity corrected by aspect ratio. The basic concept of this new roundness parameter is given by the following equation: R = Circularity + (Circularity perfect circle Circularity aspect ratio ) where Circularity perfect circle is the maximum value of circularity and Circularity aspect ratio is the circularity when only the aspect ratio varies from that of a perfect circle. Based on tests of digital circle and ellipse images using ImageJ software, the effective sizes and aspect ratios of such images for the calculation of R were found to range between 100 and 1024 pixels, and 10:1 to 10:10, respectively. R is thus given by R = C I + (0.913−C AR ) where C I is the circularity measured using ImageJ software and C AR is the sixth-degree function of the aspect ratio measured using the same software. The correlation coefficient between the new parameter R and Krumbein's roundness is 0.937 (adjusted coefficient of determination = 0.874). Results from the application of R to modern beach and slope deposits showed that R is able to quantitatively separate both types of material in terms of roundness. Therefore, we believe that the new roundness parameter R will be useful for performing precise statistical analyses of the roundness of particles in the future.

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