Dniester river mouth

Fig. 7 Scheme of the Dniester River mouth. 1 - the Dniester delta, 2 - the Glubokiy Turunchuk branch, 3 - The Dniester Branch, 4 - the Dnestrovskiy Liman, 5 - the Tsaregradskoye outlet. Settlements 6 - Majaki, 7 - Belgorod-Dnestrovskiy, 8 - OvidiopoT... 

Some information on evolution, structure and regime of the Danube, Dniester, Dnieper, Rioni, Don and Kuban river mouths at the period up to the first part of the 20th century is given in [4]. More complete and present-day characteristics of the above-mentioned river mouths are considered in [5]. 

Main characteristics of the mouth area of the Dniester River are described in [10-12]. Natural and human-induced changes in regime of the combined Dnieper and Southern Bug rivers mouth area are studied in [13,14]. Very rapid and drastic changes of the Rioni delta due to engineering works are considered in [15]. 

Mouth areas of the Danube, Dniester, Dnieper and Southern Bug, Don, Kuban and Rioni rivers are the most important in the region of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Mouth areas of these rivers differ from other mouths not because of only their large size and a great diversity of landscape. These river... 

The open nearshores of the majority of the rivers under study are deep. Mean slope of the open nearshore bottom at the Rioni mouth is 6.5%o ( old delta) and 14.3%o ( new delta) [3]. Less deep are the open nearshores of the Danube and Kuban rivers [3,5]. The open nearshores of this kind are typical of the Dniester, Dnieper and Don mouths [5]. 

During the high-flow periods, waters with small salinity can reach the Zmeiny Island in the east, Bulgarian coast in the south and the Dniester mouth in the north. During very significant spring-summer river floods, the area of the Danube influence occupies 70% of the northwestern part of the Black Sea. The total area of this direct river influence, defined according to the freshwater phytoplankton presence, is not less than 105 km2 [9]. 

Observations show that the area of hypoxia directly depends on volume of the Danube water runoff during spring-summer flood. Besides, this area depends on the time of the flood peak [9,31]. If the flood peak takes place in April, the river fresh waters are driven out of the northwestern part of the Black Sea in the south direction under the influence of predominated northern winds in this time, and hypoxia is absent. Other situation takes place if the flood peak falls on May or June, when under the impact of the southern winds, main mass of river fresh water remains in the northwestern part of the Black Sea. In this case, hypoxia forms later and in the area between the Danube and Dniester mouths [9,31]. 

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