Seabed erodibility variations on the Louisiana continental shelf before and after the 2011 Mississippi River flood

Abstract

Erodibility is critical to the sediment resuspension process but has not been measured systematically in large river-dominated muddy continental shelves before. During early summer of 2011, the Mississippi River experienced a major flood event. This flood provided a unique opportunity to examine how shelf seabed erodibility responded to a large river flood, and the ultimate fate of flood deposition is important to geological and biogeochemical processes (e.g., stratal formation, carbon sequestration).A total of 106 sediment cores were collected on the Louisiana shelf during five cruises in 2010 and 2011, and a new dataset was used to evaluate the response of the seabed to the recent conditions. The localized flood deposit was mainly within tens of kilometers of river sources, and little sediment accumulated on the middle Louisiana shelf. Seabed erodibility was measured using a dual-core Gust Erosion Microcosm System. The erodibility of sediment collected in April 2011 exceeded that for August 2010 and August 2011. The springtime increase in erodibility seemed to be related to the recent presence of energetic waves that mobilized the seabed. Erodibility was highest on the inner shelf southwest of Atchafalaya Bay, intermediate on the middle shelf, lowest in the Mississippi Canyon, and highly variable on the Mississippi subaqueous delta. These spatial patterns were influenced by proximity to river sources, flood-deposit thicknesses, intensity of wave-driven bed stresses, and bioturbation. The flood-deposit thickness itself, however, was not sufficient to explain all the spatial variations of erodibility after the peak of the Mississippi flood. Comparing values to published data, the depth-varying erodibility on the Louisiana shelf was close to the “low erodibility” level for the York River of Virginia, and similar to the data collected from Baltimore Harbor in Maryland and the main stem of upper Chesapeake Bay. Our findings promote understanding of the resuspension of fluffy organic-rich layer at the water–sediment interface, which influences sediment oxygen demand on the Louisiana shelf. This dataset is also valuable to observational and modeling studies of large river sediment dispersal systems worldwide.