Sediment characteristic of the continental shelf in the northern Gulf of Mexico

Abstract

The Mississippi River is the largest river in the United States and discharges substantial amounts of nutrients, organic carbon, and sedi­ments onto the Texas-Louisiana continental shelf in the northern Gulf of Mexico. As a ba­sic part of an initiative to describe processes at the sediment-water interface in the northern Gulf of Mexico shelf ecosystem we measured sediment grain size and per cent total organic carbon. This paper reports sediment grain size characteristics and per cent carbon, and makes preliminary associations between these varia­bles and carbon utilization by the benthos (cal­culated from sediment oxygen consumption ra­tes) and macrofauna biomass.