Large structural estuaries: Their global distribution and morphology

Abstract

Estuaries are marine-flooded topographic depressions that receive sediment from both marine and fluvial sources. The morphology of the underlying drainage basin acts as a boundary condition for the spatial distribution of hydrodynamic energy within an estuary, and by extension the resultant depositional environment. In some large estuaries, bedrock structures at the mouth restrict oceanographic forcing, which has impacts on sedimentary infill. Such estuaries are termed here as Large Structural Estuaries (LSEs). For LSEs, the shape of the basin and associated bedrock morphology is fixed on the millennial scale having been formed by geological processes operating over timescales greater than t..