Turbidite

Imagine a big pile of sand on the bottom of the ocean. Now imagine a big storm coming along, like a hurricane. This storm makes big waves that are strong enough to pick up some of the sand from the bottom of the ocean and move it around.

When the waves finally calm down, the sand that was picked up by the waves settles back down onto the bottom of the ocean. But it doesn't settle down in a nice, neat pile like it was before. Instead, it gets jumbled up and mixed around while it's being moved by the waves.

This mixed up pile of sand is like a turbidite. It's made up of layers of different types of sediment (like sand, silt, and clay) that got mixed around by the big waves of the storm. And just like how each layer in a cake tells you something different about what went into making it, each layer in a turbidite can tell us something about what was happening in the ocean at that time.