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Restoration sedimentology

Nature Geoscience volume 5, pages 758–759 (2012)Cite this article

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River regulation and sea-level rise have damaged deltaic ecosystems as well as the sedimentological processes that support them. More scientific effort needs to be directed towards restoring land-building processes in our vanishing deltas.

The world's river deltas are sinking into the ocean1. Every hour, an expanse of coastal land the size of an American football field disappears from the Mississippi River delta2. But deltaic land is valuable: it supports both productive ecosystems and densely populated cities. These threatened environments need to be restored.

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Figure 1: Land-building sediment budget in a delta.
Figure 2: The morphology of deltaic land resulting from a sediment supply of a, sand and b, silt.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Douglas A. Edmonds is at the Department of Geological Sciences, Indiana University, 1001 E. 10th Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47404, USA,

    Douglas A. Edmonds

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  1. Douglas A. Edmonds
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Correspondence to Douglas A. Edmonds.

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Edmonds, D. Restoration sedimentology. Nature Geosci 5, 758–759 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1620

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