Salt marsh sedimentation over the past c. 120 years along the west Cotentin coast of Normandy (France): Relationship to sea-level rise and sediment supply
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Natural high sediment supply to a number of macrotidal estuaries along the western coast of the Cotentin Peninsula (Normandy, France) is resulting in estuarine infilling. A previously published aerial survey in one estuary shows salt marsh laterally expanding at a rate of $4400m^ {2}/y$. Five sediment cores collected from salt marshes in three estuaries (Havre de Carteret, Havre de Surville, and Havre de Lessay) are used to investigate the relationship between lateral and vertical salt marsh accretion, and sea level. The cores are chemostratigraphically correlated with reference to is established by 210Pb and 137Cs dating of one of the cores, providing a chronologyextending back to $1880\pm23$. Through this period, mean vertical accretion rates for single cores from interior planar salt marsh surface sites at Surville and Lessay are 7.7 and 6.3mm/y respectively. Three cores from Carteret were taken from a seaward sloping salt marsh, one each from low, middle and high marsh settings, yielding mean vertical accretion rates of 5.5, 4.4, and 4.1 mm/y respectively. These data are compared with a regional rise in relative mean sea level (msl) of 3.9mm/y determined from a tide gauge on the nearby island of Jersey from 1952-2001. The high marsh at Carteret appears to be accreting relative position to msl, as there is no significant upcore change in the faunas. A core from Surville, however, indicates salt marsh emergence, demonstrated by transitions from sandflat to salt marsh faunas. The low marsh core from Cateret reveals a recent acceleration in vertical accretion (8mm/y since $1975\pm5$) and may be related to an increase in sediment availability due to the cessation of intertidal sand mining. This study demonstrates the long-term emergence of the Cotentin salt marshes, but suggests no general increase in vertical accretion despite increased sediment supply from recent mining cessation. Rather, newly available sediments support enhanced accretion along the marsh edge and rapid development of new marsh surface through lateral accretion. This study is in close agreement with a previous study of stilt marsh deposition from the macrotidal Bay of Fundy (Canada) that states high marsh accretion reflects sea-level or hydrological changes, whilst low marsh accretion is greatly influenced by changes in sediment supply. For future studies, knowledge of these relationships enables the selection of sites according to the aims of the investigation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".