Sediment grain size, organic content, and Pb-210 excess activity in Coos Bay from 2021-05-17 to 2021-05-19 (NCEI Accession 0277842)

Sediment cores were collected from intertidal flats and shallow subtidal areas throughout the Coos Bay Estuary in May 2021 using a push corer or Russian peat corer as outlined in Souza et al., 2022 (MS thesis). Cores were typically on the order of tens of centimeters to one meter long. Cores were subsampled in the field in 1-cm increments and returned to the lab for grain-size, loss-on-ignition (organic content), and/or Pb-210 isotope analyses on selected intervals. Not every interval of each core was analyzed for every parameter. Sandier cores were not analyzed for Pb-210. For muddy cores, organic contents and grain-size distributions were analyzed in greater abundance than Pb-210.

The files provided include one netcdf file for each of the twelve cores. Each file contains grain-size distribution data for each interval in the core that was analyzed. The files for Brown’s Cove (BC), Bull Island (BI), Charleston (CH), Crown Point (CP), East Flats 2 (EF2), Isthmus Slough (IS), Kentuck Flats (KF), and Kunz Marsh (KM) all include down-core lead-210 (Pb-210) isotope activity data. These are total activities (i.e., they have not been corrected for in situ or supported lead production; see Souza, 2022 for discussion). All files except the files for Crown Point, East Flats, Kentuck Flats, and North Point include down-core organic content data.