PRELIMINARY RESULTS OF SHALLOW CORING IN WEEKS BAY, BALDWIN COUNTY, ALABAMA.
Through the use of shallow piston corers, we have successfully collected 12 sediment cores up to 4 m in length from Weeks Bay, a small estuary located in Baldwin County, Alabama. Each core is being examined for variations in mineralogy, grain size and faunal content. To date, three cores have been sub-sampled for grain size and mineralogical variation on a cm-scale. Cores collected proximal to shorelines are dominated by sandy silt and sand. Those collected from central portions of the bay are dominated by silty clay. All cores contain intervals of finer or coarser sediment which we interpret as the results of episodic sedimentation events. In particular, coarser intervals within cores collected from the central part of Weeks Bay are interpreted as sand influxes driven by either storms or flood events.
We have yet to obtain radiometric dates from the cores that we have collected, however, a bottom date collected from a companion core being examined for faunal content yielded a date of approximately 6000 year B.P. (M. Fearn, pers. comm.). Sedimentological criteria also lead us to believe that in at least two of our cores (those closest to the present shorelines), we have completely penetrated the Holocene sediment fill of Weeks Bay.
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|Publication:||Journal of the Alabama Academy of Science|
|Article Type:||Brief Article|
|Date:||Apr 1, 2001|
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