Representing Holocene and Recent Sediment Source-to-Sink Processes of the Central Italian Adriatic Sea
Abstract
The Coastal System Tract concept (Cowell et al., in press) expresses the importance of sediment-sharing processes between a variety of individual system elements in a given coastal region. The surf zone/beach system, the shoreface/shelf system and the inlet/estuary system are all examples of the individual system elements. There are many others examples dictated by the scale and nature of the specific problem undergoing analyses. The CST-Model has been developed to provide a quantitative tool that represents the complex interactions between arbituary combinations of the sediment-sharing elements. This is a large-scale behavior-oriented 2-DH model, based on representations of the physics of the macroscopic morphodynamic processes. The model operates on an inter-annual time scale so that it can resolve trends in system-wide morphology over periods of decades to millennia. It is capable of resolving various combinations of river sources, estuaries and lagoons, flood- and ebb-tide shoal complexes, and inlets in concert with a littoral surf zone, shoreface, continental shelf and upper continental slope. The shoreline translates according to the dictates of sediment transport gradients. Although the individual components are portrayed in different numerical schemes they are linked by a common time-step so that the non-linear aspects of system integration are preserved. The CST-Model has been used to examine several different examples of coastal system tracts. In one case, the effects of millennial-scale Dansgaar-Oeschger late Quartenary climate and sea level cycles with amplitudes on the order of 0.5 m were examined using a system that contains a river, estuary, inlet, barrier island, shoreface and shelf complex. The system of clinoform development and coastal progradation predicted in the model are similar to those observed on the central Florida Panhandle coast. In another case, the development of a Holocene subaqueous shelf clinoform along the central Italian Adriatic coast was modeled. A number of different source and forcing parameter patterns were varied to demonstrate features that can be identified in the internal stratigraphy of the deposits. These compared favorably with patterns identified in the sub-bottom records. The CST-Model examples illustrate how large-scale processes can either be diagnosed with modeling techniques or simulated in order to make predictions. This model is publicly available to the research community.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2003
- Bibcode:
- 2003AGUFMOS51D..06N
- Keywords:
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- 1625 Geomorphology and weathering (1824;
- 1886);
- 1815 Erosion and sedimentation;
- 3045 Seafloor morphology and bottom photography;
- 4255 Numerical modeling;
- 4556 Sea level variations