Babbage River delta and lagoon; hydrology and sedimentology of an Arctic estuarine system

Inputs, transfer processes, and storage characteristics of water and sediment have been investigated in a 40-km² estuarine system on the central Yukon coast. The setting is transgressive, microtidal, and high-latitude (69°N). The Babbage Estuary system can be subdivided into fluvial, tidal-distributary, delta-plain, intertidal, lagoon, marginal-supratidal, and barrier subsystems, each associated with one or more distinctive depositional environments and characteristic lithofacies assemblages. The structure of the system has been examined in terms of links between subsystems and overall system response to input perturbations. Although the propagation of tide and surge within the estuary may be treated as a quasi-linear stochastic process, transfers of fluvial water and sediment through the system are highly non-linear. Furthermore, the parameters of the system change dramatically on an annual cycle. Inputs and associated system responses are dominated in the short run by seasonal- and synoptic-scale variance, the former reflecting major seasonal adjustments in the phase distribution, circulation process, iand input regime of the estuary. The annual salinity cycle, with a range of…

Publisher

Government of Yukon

Resources

2

Catalogue metadata updated

2026-09-09