Thumbnail Image
Item

A 100-Year Sediment Budget for Chesapeake Bay

Hobbs, Carl H.
; 
Halka, Jeffery P.
; 
Kerhin, Randall T.
; 
Carron, Michael J.
Abstract
Chesapeake Bay is a depositional basin that is filling from both ends and the sides. During the century ended in the mid-1950s between 1.0 x 109 and 2.92 x 109 metric tons of sediment accumulated in the bay. The bay's largest tributary, the Susquehanna River, is a major source of fine-grained sediments; its coarser load being trapped by dams. The continental shelf is the largest single source of sediment for the basin. A massive quantity of sand, perhaps as much of forty percent of the net deposition, enters the bay between the Virginia capes and works its way tens of kilometers upstream, potentially as far north as Tangier Island, near the Virginia-Maryland boundary. Other sources of sediment are shoreline erosion, biogenic production, preHolocene outcrops, and the other tributaries. These tributary estuaries do provide coarse sediment to the bay through longshore transport and bedload movement in the nearshore.shallows and, perhaps, in the channel bottom. The contribution of suspended or fine-grained sediment by the tributary estuaries is unknown. Indeed they may be sinks and not sources. 'The contribution of the tributary estuaries and the quantification of the bay-mouth sand-source and uncertainties associated with the bathymetric comparisons in the determination of the net mass of sediment deposition, make it difficult to balance a sediment budget for Chesapeake Bay. Most of the imbalance is in the sand fraction within the Virginia portion of the system; with far more sand being deposited than can be accounted for by the independently quantifiable sources. Not considering the continental shelf as a source of sand, the budget fails to balance by a factor of between 2.7 and 7.6. Making certain assumptions about the quantity of sanQ entering the bay through its mouth (the continental shelf source), the difference can be sufficiently reduced that the budget more nearly balances.
Description
Date
1990-11-01
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Collections
Research & Technical Reports
Show all metadata
Download Dataset
Files
Thumbnail Image
sramsoe307ocr.pdf
Adobe PDF, 1.64 MB
Rights Holder
Usage License
Embargo
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
Research and Technical Reports Special Reports in Applied Marine Science and Ocean Engineering (SRAMSOE), Sedimentation, Chesapeake Bay, Depositional Basin
Citation
Advisor
Department
Virginia Institute of Marine Science
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21220/V5RX6S
URI
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/handle/internal/14130
Embedded videos