Often, they coalesce and overlap to form channel levee complexes which are the building blocks of many major submarine fans.
There have been efforts to produce an up-to-date, holistic view, but even since then there has been a significant number of papers which take concepts even further.
To help encourage this unification of phrases into a clearer architectural hierarchy, this study will use Kane's nomenclature.
[3] External levees are a dominantly depositional body forming a constructional wedge of sediment that thins perpendicularly away from a channel-belt.
The external levee forms during the evolution of a genetically related channel-belt (or slope valley, channel fairway) by flows that partially spill out of their confinement.
[14] Internal levees may form distinct wedges of sediment where enough space is available; where space is limited, i.e., where overspill from underfit channels interacts with external levees or erosional confinement, overspill deposits may appear superficially similar to terrace deposits, which are widely identified in the subsurface.
It can vary between occasional low amplitude bends to highly sinuous, densely looping channels.
In recent years there are increasingly mixed opinions in academic literature as to how far they are analogous to each other with some feeling that such notions of similarity should not hold.
[21][22] However, there are significant dissimilarities the biggest in that submarine channels can exhibit both lateral and vertical migration.
Lateral accretion packages are believed to form as a result of depositional rather than topographical forcing.
This lateral migration only style of sinuosity is believed to be somewhat rare in occurrence within turbidite systems.
One potential process may be as a result of heterogeneous infilling of the older channel forming an offset conduit for later flows.
Whatever the process this stacking plays an important role in aggradational systems and potentially is one of the leading controls in the formation of levee confined complexes.
In terms of sinuosity, Mayall shows that this vertical migration occurs on the outward sides of bends reinforcing any pre-existing curvature.
Topographic influences can come in the form of the surface expression of faults or changes in topography as a result of salt/shale tectonics, whether through diapirism or subsurface folding.