Floods, Floodplains, and Fluvial Studies

Type: Paper Session

Time: 11/7/2020 03:30 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) to 4:45 PM

Session Description and Agenda

Special Paper Session: Floods, Floodplains, and Fluvial Studies

1) Getting your feet wet: Strategies for implementing field-based stream research in large undergraduate classes

2) Variations in the Water Quality of Tributary Streams within the Cache River Watershed in Eastern Arkansas

3) Drivers for vegetation recovery on point bars – modeling and mapping vegetation regrowth in the mid-Apalachicola River, Florida

4) Origin Hypothesis for North Carolina Outer Banks Barrier Islands, Capes, and Coastal Plain Surface Hydrology Patterns

5) Insights from Paired Profiles of a Disturbed Coastal Plain River

Origin Hypothesis for North Carolina Outer Banks Barrier Islands, Capes, and Coastal Plain Surface Hydrology Patterns

Session: Floods, Floodplains, and Fluvial Studies
Type: Paper Session

Abstract

The geomorphology of the North Carolina Barrier Island and Cape System suggests an origin related to Carolina Bay formation. The North Carolina Outer Banks generally includes long slender ribbons of sand called barrier islands and the capes Hatteras, Lookout, and Cape Fear.  Additionally included in this study is Cape Canaveral along the Florida Atlantic Coast. The work of Michael Davias has provided characteristics diagnostics of Carolina Bays including a consistent eccentricity of .65. Although the Davias data is derived from smaller scale Carolina Bays, the same diagnostic principles are applied to delineate much larger Carolina Bay Structures. Using lidar images, and the Davias diagnostics, new Carolina Bay boundaries (sand rims) align with and become North Carolina Outer Banks barrier islands. The same alignment of large Carolina Bay sand rims, along with sea level, also control the location of North Carolina Capes. On the mainland, river channel spatial morphology is controlled by large Carolina Bay boundaries explaining river curvatures and drainage basin network patterns exhibited by coastal plain surface hydrology (ex: western bank of the Cape Fear along the Brunswick / New Hanover County boundary).  Additionally, by applying larger Carolina Bay determination methodology to the Atlantic Ocean embayment off the Georgia / Florida coast, a large Carolina Bay structure responsible for the shoreline and submerged embayment curvatures is discernable.  Ten new Carolina Bays are identified within this paper offering a new hypothesis origin for North Carolina Capes, Outer Banks barrier Islands, hydrologic drainage patterns, and Cape Canaveral.

Authors