HR: 14:50h
AN: H53L-05    [Abstracts]
TI: Downstream Patterns of Bed-material Grain Size in a Large, Lowland Alluvial River Subject to low Sediment Supply
AU: * Singer, M B
EM: bliss@icess.ucsb.edu
AF: Institute for Computational Earth System Science, 6832 Ellison Hall University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3060, United States
AB: Downstream patterns of bed-material grain size were investigated over ~380 km of the Sacramento River in northern California, USA. Representative subaqueous bed-material samples were collected from ~125 cross sections spaced ~2 km apart using the 8.2 liter Ponar dredge sampler (for fine beds) and the 23.2 liter Cooper Scooper drag bucket sampler (for mixed and coarse beds), both of which were deployed from a jet boat. Samples were extracted from crossing points in straight reaches that represent the integration of sediment transport through upstream bends. Single samples were collected at simple, narrow cross sections and up to three samples were collected at sections with variable cross-stream topography. Samples were aggregated for each cross section, dried, sieved through eleven phi-sized mesh sieves (0.063-128 mm), and weighed to compute grain size distributions. The largest grain in >95% of all aggregated samples made up <5% of the total sample dry weight, rendering them adequately representative. Sacramento River grain size data suggest departure from widely accepted notions of bed material sorting in rivers in three fundamental ways: 1) subaqueous grain size data differ systematically from nearby data collected from exposed bars; 2) the transition from gravel to sand is not abrupt, but instead extends for several hundred kilometers; and 3) tributaries tend to have a small impact on mainstem downstream grain size sorting. These findings either imply something unique about the Sacramento River dataset compared with prior published data or differences in data collection methods and both possibilities were investigated. The Sacramento River basin is subject to lower sediment supply compared with prior systematically surveyed basins. The impact of decreasing supply (associated with a declining glacial hangover and human impacts) is a decoupling between main channel sediment transport and bar deposition. Thus, in addition to the inherent processes of grain-size censoring that occur on bars, relict bars in a regime of declining sediment supply represent a former state of balance between transport and storage. As such, bar samples are unrepresentative of the currently active processes of sediment movement. Similarly, the low sediment supply probably lengthens the distance over which the bed transitions from gravel to sand. This may occur because bed degradation exposes relatively fine material underlying the gravel bed or because fine sediment supplied from tributaries and bank erosion overwhelms gravel locally in areas of low local slope. Finally, tributaries in the Sacramento Valley do not significantly affect downstream sorting (e.g. by increasing median grain size) because their sediment loads become sorted as they travel across the wide forearc basin of the Central Valley before debouching into the Sacramento River.
DE: 1803 Anthropogenic effects (4802, 4902)
DE: 1825 Geomorphology: fluvial (1625)
DE: 1834 Human impacts
DE: 1856 River channels (0483, 0744)
DE: 1862 Sediment transport (4558)
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting