Sediment dispersion: part 2, characterisation by size of sand fraction and percent mud

Abstract

In part 2 of this contribution, examples are drawn from the River Mersey and Liverpool Bay illustrating the use of simple statistical parameters to describe dispersion of sands and muddy sediments. The River Mersey and Liverpool Bay, eastern Irish Sea, were sites of intensive studies on the dispersal of dumped harbour mud and sewage sludge during the mid 1960's–70's. The combined effects of strong tidal scour, wave action and shoreward near-bed residual drift result in shoreward transport of large volumes of sand in the bay. Large amounts of mud (silt/clay mixtures) oscillate in the river estuary, and naturally derived and dumped muds also move shoreward in the bay. Unpublished historic geochemical data have been combined with reprocessed particle size data and both have been used to reassess sedimentological techniques for defining transport and dispersal pathways. River and bay muds have similar size compositions, but river muds have excess Cd > V > U > As = Zn relative to bay muds. The lower relative concentrations of heavy metals in the bay are thought to reflect desorption and degradation of organic matter from the river. Trends in sediment distribution data based on the means of the sand size fraction, alone, provide sensitivities comparable to those of higher order moment measures and are usually easier to interpret than full size spectrum analyses.