Dolomite as a tracer for sediment transport and deposition on the northwestern Adriatic continental shelf (Adriatic Sea, Italy)

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Surface sediments of the Northern and Middle Adriatic shelf were studied during five cruises, from 1977 to 1990, in order to map the distribution of Ca and Mg carbonates in bottom sediments of the Adriatic Sea. The aim of this work was to trace the preferential depositional areas of sediments derived from Italian rivers by distinguishing among the contributions from northeastern Italian rivers, the Po and Apenninic streams. The pattern distribution of dolomite concentration proved to be a good tracer of the alongshore transport of particulate material from the Northern toward the Middle and Southern Adriatic. Moreover, dolomite and textural sedimentary parameters such as grain size distributions discriminate between local, recent sources, and regional, older sources of bottom sedimentary material. The analysis of the main pathways of sediment transfer between different shelf compartments shows that a huge amount of material is transferred from north to south. This occurs in two main shelf sectors: along the Romagna coast, sediments moving inside the belt delimited by the 20 m isobaths are influenced by the local river input and minor coastal gyres, whereas offshore sediments, coming from the northern Adriatic Sea, are transported southward by the Northern Adriatic Coastal Current (NACC); along the Marche and Abruzzo coasts, the “local” belt extends offshore on the outer shelf. In order to obtain a quantitative estimate of sediment accumulation of fine sediments of Northern Adriatic origin along the shelf sectors, a mass budget was calculated for bulk sediments and for dolomite contributions. The budget shows that the amount of sediment transferred between adjacent boxes is always of the order of 50% of the fluvial input to the sea.