Delaware Inland Bays

Long Island Sound -— Gardiners Bay Great South Bay Barnegat Bay ---Delaware Inland Bays... 

Luther III, G.W., Ma, S., Trouwborst, R., Glazer, B., Blickley, M., Scarborough, R.W., and Mensinger, M.G. (2004) The roles of anoxia, H2S and storm events in fish kills of dead-end canals of Delaware inland bays. Estuaries 27, 551-560. 

The Delaware Inland Bays are comprised of three interconnected estuaries Rehoboth Bay, Indian River Bay and Little Assawoman Bay, located on the mid-Atlantic coast of Delaware (Figure 1). Although dwarfed in size by large east coast estuaries such as the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, the Delaware Inland Bays are more typical of the numerous small, shallow, poorly-flushed systems that are found along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. 

Scudlark, J.R. Church, T.M. Report to Center for Delaware Inland Bays, Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, 1999. 

Various polarographic techniques have been successfully used to measure elemental sulfur, S , and sulfide (H2S and HS ) concentrations in laboratory solutions [116], salt water [117], saline lake [118], freshwater [119], lake porewaters [120], salt marsh sediments [109,120], and marine porewaters [121], Using stripping square wave voltammetry, researchers have been able to measure sulfide species at nanomolar concentrations [118-120, 122,123], Recently, cyclic and linear sweep voltammetries have been used to quantify elemental sulfur S , hydrogenosulfide (HS ) and polysulfides (S ) with fast scan rates (IV s ) [124] for example, in estuarine sediments (from Rehoboth Bay, an inland bay located in Delaware), the sulfur speciation was found to change throughout a core profile, with dominant in the top layers (0-6 cm), dominant... 

Largely as the result of such studies, the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments contain specific provisions (Section 112m, the so-called "Great Waters section) which legislatively mandate an examination of atmospheric contaminant deposition to coastal and inland waters. This includes smaller east coast estuaries such as Delaware s Inland Bays (Rehoboth and Indian River) since their combined output to local shelf waters can be equivalent. With this in mind, the primary objective of this study was to accurately assess the relative atmospheric and fluvial loading of trace elements to the Inland Bays. 

A comparison of atmospheric versus fluvial loading of selected dissolved trace elements to Delaware s Inland Bays indicates that on an annual basis, aeolian input provides as much as a third of the total input for Zn and at least 5% for the other metals. On shorter time scales, the relative atmospheric and fluvial loadings can vary significantly. Approximately half of the atmospheric input is directly to the surface waters of the bays, a majority of which is derived from wet deposition. The transmission of atmospheric inputs through the watershed varies among elements and for each sub-basin. Overall, atmospheric flux appears to provide quantitatively and qualitatively important inputs for a number of trace metals of ecological concern. 

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