Uppanar River Estuary Case Study

Seasonal variations in Sedimentological Charecteristics of Uppanar River Estuary. South East Coast of India
S.Jasmine Sheeba, G. Ramesh, G. Gnanachandrasamy, T. Ramkumar, Magdalina Monica Rozaria, K. Sujatha
Department of Earth Sciences, Annamalai University, Annamalai Nagar, 608002.INDIA

ABSTRACT
The estuaine environment are dynamic and they are the intermediate zone between the marine and fresh water regions. This makes the estuarine region more dynamic in physical and chemical characteristic. These regions serves as a passage for the continental materials reach the marine environment. Because of the influence of fresh water and marine water this regions the depositional systems are dynamic and complex in nature. Despite the complexity
Estuaries are thus, the most complex of all aquatic environments with regard to the source and composition of aquatic sediments (Leenheer, 1991).
Sediments are moved into an estuary both as suspended load and bed load. The nature of sediment bed formation depends on the energy transmission to the particles, which in turn controlled by the transport modes. In many estuaries, tides are the major energy source for mixing fresh and salt water, for resuspending sediments from the bed and also for transporting suspended sediments either to seaward or
It has been well recognized that the grain size distributions reflect the hydraulic environment in which the grains were transported and deposited. Several approaches have been used to interpret depositional environments from grain size distributions such as plotting skewness versus sorting (Friedman 1961) and comparing the coasrsest fraction to the median size (Passegial 1964, Middleton 1976). Sagoe and Visher (1977) have also examined the relationships between grain size distribution and hydraulics and they emphasized that the effects of the transporting fluid on sediment grains provide a basis for interpreting hydraulic conditions from grain size