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Keeping Pace With Relative Sea Level Rise: Marsh Platform Monitoring Shows Minimal Sediment Deficit Along The Louisiana Coast, Kelly Marie Sanks
Keeping Pace With Relative Sea Level Rise: Marsh Platform Monitoring Shows Minimal Sediment Deficit Along The Louisiana Coast, Kelly Marie Sanks
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Recent reports estimate that the marshes of the Mississippi Delta receive just 30% of the sediment necessary to sustain current land area1. An extensive monitoring campaign by the USGS and LCPRA provides direct measurements of sediment accumulation, subsidence rates, and deposit characteristics along the coast over the past 10 years2, allowing us to directly evaluate this sediment balance. By interpolating bulk density, organic fraction, and vertical accretion rates from 273 sites, a direct measurement of organic and inorganic sediment accumulation can be made. Results show that a total of 82 MT/year of sediment is delivered to the coast. Using a …