1945/04/01 by L. C. Gottschalk · 4 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Aeolian processes and effects #Chesapeake bay #Environmental science #Erosion #Estuary #Geology #Geomorphology #Geotechnical engineering #Hydrology (agriculture) #Oceanography
paper · doi:10.2307/211476
openalex publication_date 1945/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
T TR of the Chaldees, original home of Abraham, was a thriving seaport at the head of the Persian Gulf about 3000 B.C. Today its partly unearthed ruins lie in the desert I50 miles from the present shores of the Gulf Century after century, the sediment brought down by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers from the overgrazed highlands of Turkey, Syria, Iran, and 'Iraq has pushed back the head of tidewater. Currently the sediment load of the twin rivers is about 4 million cubic yards annually,' causing the delta to advance at the rate of about I mile in 30 years. At the head of the Chesapeake Bay 85 million cubic yards of sediment2 was deposited between I846 and 1938. The average depth of water over an area of 32 square miles was reduced by 212 feet (see Fig. 2). New land comprising 787 acres was added to the state of Maryland. The Susquehanna River is repeating the history of the Tigris and Euphrates. It is not, perhaps, generally realized that sedimentation caused the abandonment of many early American ports as well as of dozens of once great foreign ports. At the sites of two early colonial ports in Maryland, Hartfordon-the-Bush and Joppa Town, stone mooring posts, which once held the hawsers of seagoing vessels, are now 2 or more miles from navigable water. Rapid sedimentation in the embayments and navigable rivers of the eastern seaboard is an abnormal condition that developed after the white man had settled this region. Both historical and geological evidence indicates that the preagricultural rate of silting of Eastern tidal estuaries was slow. The history of sedimentation of ports in the Chesapeake Bay area is an epic of the effects of uncontrolled erosion since the beginning of wholesale land clearing and cultivation more than three centuries ago.