Nearshore sediment characteristics and formation of mudbanks along the Kerala coast, southwest India

Phenomenal changes in the forms of nitrogen: results from a coastal zone of south west India

“…Hence, the monsoon period sediments are able to hold a very high load of nutrients. Note that during the monsoon period, the inshore turbidity increases; the colloidal suspension of fine mud supports prolonged sediment-water interaction during the entire monsoon period (Nair and Balchand, 1993a, b;Narayana et al, 2008). Thus, the turbidity process would largely be responsible for converting an appreciable amount of nitrates into the dissolved form.…”

“…These zones of cloudy, turbid waters with high load of suspended sediments, located adjacent to the Kerala and Karnataka state coasts are semi-circular in shape (4-6 km) and occur during the south west monsoon season (June to September months), thereby supporting rich aquatic life. More details on the hydrographical settings (Table 1) and other environmental features of this phenomena are available elsewhere (CMFRI, 1984;Nair et al, 1993;Nair and Balchand, 1993a,b;Narayana et al, 2008). The west coast of India is generally characterised by high concentration of nutrients in surface waters, brought about by upwelling process, along with high productivity and biomass and a high proportion of "new production" (Nair et al, 1984;Balachandran, 2004).…”

Shoreline changes and morphology of spits along southern Karnataka, west coast of India: A remote sensing and statistics-based approach

“…The oceanographic regime is dominated by meteorological forcing rather than tidal forcing (tidal range is about 1 m along this coast). The prominent feature in bathymetry is that the contours up to 5 m depth are closely spaced (Narayana et al, 2008). It is observed that depth contours are closely spaced in the southern part compared to the northern part of the nearshore area, suggesting that the northern part is wider and shallower compared to the southern part of the study area (Fig.…”

Environmental isotopes to test hypotheses for fluid mud (mud bank) generation mechanisms along the southwest coast of India

“…as seen in the recent studies. Near shore oceanic processes may also be responsible (Narayana et al, 2008). Abundant supply of river transported fine suspended sediment together with gently sloping coastal plain, macro tidal conditions; absence of energetic oceanic wind waves may be favouring the conditions for the formation of fluid mud.…”

“…Some recent studies have been based on: hydrography (Kurup and Varadachari, 1975;Nair, 1985), physical oceanography Jiang and Mehta, 1996;Tatavarti and Narayana, 2006), water quality characteristics (Rao et al, 1984a;Balachandran, 2004) and ecology (Nair et al, 1984;Thompson, 1986) of the mud bank region and physical (Manoj Kumar et al, 1998), sedimentological (Ramachandran and Mallik, 1985;Mallik et al, 1988;Narayana et al, 2008), mineralogical (Nair and Murty 1966;Rao et al, 1984b), geochemical (Sheshappa, 1953;Jacob and Qasim, 1974;Ramachandran, 1989), hydrochemical (Nair and Balchand, 1992) and rheological (Fass, 1995;Jiang and Mehta, 1995) aspects of the mud. Although, some of the characteristics of the fluid mud have been explained by the above studies, its occurrence still remains a mystery.…”