Subaqueous deltaic formation on the Atchafalaya Shelf, Louisiana

The Atchafalaya River in Louisiana shares the third largest drainage basin in the world with the Mississippi River. Sediment cores and seismic profiles were used to examine the development and impact on land accretion of an early-stage subaqueous delta accumulating on the shallow (<25 m water depth) continental shelf seaward of the Atchafalaya River mouths in the period (∼100 years) since the Atchafalaya has captured a significant fraction of the overall Mississippi discharge. The subaqueous clinoform is muddy (70-100% finer than 63 μm) and extends approximately 21-26 km seaward of the shell reef (to 8 m water depth) across the mouth of the Atchafalaya Bay, with a discontinuous, and, in places, mobile modern mud layer <20 cm thick covering a relict deltaic shoal area further seaward. The sigmoidal clinoform has a topset surface that steepens from east to west (1:2500 to 1:1600), a foreset with maximum slopes of about 1:550, and a limited bottomset region (<0.5 km wide). 210Pb and 137Cs geochronology show maximum sediment accumulation rates (>3 cm/year) correspond to the foreset and bottomset region, with rates decreasing to as low as 0.9 cm/year on the shelf topset region and its extension inside Atchafalaya Bay. Seven sedimentary facies are observed in the subaqueous delta, with differences created by degree of biological destruction of physical stratification, which is inversely related to sediment accumulation rate, and by the proximity of an area to the riverine sand source. There is a marked alongshore sediment dispersal pattern observed by the progressive winnowing of sand and coarse silt to the west. There is also a significant increase in shell content in Atchafalaya Bay relative to shelf facies. The resulting sigmoidal clinoform deposit (<3 m thick) more closely resembles strata geometries of subaqueous mud deltas associated with energetic systems (e.g., Amazon, Ganges-Brahmaputra, Fly), than it does the mature Mississippi delta 180 km to the east, albeit on a smaller scale and in shallow water.