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The flocculation behavior of clay minerals in aquatic environments is an important process in estuarine and riverine dynamics, where strong gradients in salinity can locally occur. Various contradicting observations have been reported in the literature on the impact of salt concentration on the settling process of cohesive sediments. To address this issue in a systematic manner, we investigate the settling behavior of clay minerals as a function of the salt concentration of the ambient water. Specifically, we focus on montmorillonite as a prototype clay mineral with a high cation exchange capacity (CEC). To this end, we study suspensions of Wyoming bentonite (Volclay SPV) as a very important constituent for many constructional and industrial purposes. We perform an experimental campaign to study the settling behavior of moderately turbid montmorillonite concentrations in monovalent salt solutions with different salinities (sodium chloride) to represent different environments ranging from deionized to ocean water, respectively. The subsequent settling process was monitored by taking pictures by a camera in regular time intervals over a total observation time up to 48 h. In addition, a modified hydrometer analysis is conducted to determine the grain size distribution (in terms of an equivalent diameter) of the flocculated clay suspension in salt water. Despite the rather high cation exchange capacity of the investigated clay (CEC=88.1), our results show that the settling speed drastically increases within a range of 0.6–1.0 PSU and stays approximately constant for higher salinities. This critical salt concentration is defined here as the critical coagulation concentration (CCC) and lies well below the salinity of natural open water bodies. The hydrometer analysis revealed that 60% of the agglomerates exceed the equivalent grain size of 20 μm. Finally, the findings of this study are supplemented with experiments studying the effect of Extracellular Polymeric Substances (EPS) on the flocculation behavior of bentonite in salt water. Our results demonstrate that salinity is the original trigger for flocculation, whereas EPS allows for even larger floc size but it does not play a significant role for the settling processes of bentonite in estuarine environments.

The shape and size of sedimentary bedforms play a key role in the reconstruction of sedimentary processes in modern and ancient environments. Recent laboratory experiments have shown that bedforms in mixed sand–clay develop at a slower rate and often have smaller heights and lengths than equivalent bedforms in pure sand. This is generally attributed to cohesive forces that can be of physical origin, caused by electrostatic forces of attraction between clay minerals, and of biological origin, caused by ‘sticky’ extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) produced by micro-organisms, such as microalgae (microphytobenthos) and bacteria. In the present paper, we demonstrate, for the first time, that these laboratory experiments are a suitable analogue for current ripples formed by tidal currents on a natural mixed sand–mud–EPS intertidal flat in a macrotidal estuary. Moreover, both the field data and the laboratory data demonstrate that the widely used definitions of ‘clean sand’ (

This work was supported by the UK Natural Environment Research Council under grant NE/I027223/1 (COHBED). D.M.P. acknowledges the support of the Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland (MASTS) pooling initiative in the completion of this study. MASTS is funded by the Scottish Funding Council (grant reference HR09011) and contributing institutions. Biologically active, fine-grained sediment forms abundant sedimentary deposits on Earth's surface, and mixed mud-sand dominates many coasts, deltas, and estuaries. Our predictions of sediment transport and bed roughness in these environments presently rely on empirically based bed form predictors that are based exclusively on biologically inactive cohesionless silt, sand, and gravel. This approach underpins many paleoenvironmental reconstructions of sedimentary successions, which rely on analysis of cross-stratification and bounding surfaces produced by migrating bed forms. Here we present controlled laboratory experiments that identify and quantify the influence of physical and biological cohesion on equilibrium bed form morphology. The results show the profound influence of biological cohesion on bed form size and identify how cohesive bonding mechanisms in different sediment mixtures govern the relationships. The findings highlight that existing bed form predictors require reformulation for combined biophysical cohesive effects in order to improve morphodynamic model predictions and to enhance the interpretations of these environments in the geological record. Publisher PDF

Due to climate change, sea level rise and anthropogenic development, coastal communities have been facing increasing threats from flooding, land loss, and deterioration of water quality, to name just a few. Most of these pressing problems are directly or indirectly associated with the transport of cohesive fine-grained sediments that form porous aggregates of particles, called flocs. Through their complex structures, flocs are vehicles for the transport of organic carbon, nutrients, and contaminants. Most coastal/estuarine models neglect the flocculation process, which poses a considerable limitation of their predictive capability. We describe a set of experimental and numerical tools that represent the state-of-the-art and can, if combined properly, yield answers to many of the aforementioned issues. In particular, we cover floc measurement techniques and strategies for grain-resolving simulations that can be used as an accurate and efficient means to generate highly-resolved data under idealized conditions. These data feed into continuum models in terms of population balance equations to describe the temporal evolution of flocs. The combined approach allows for a comprehensive investigation across the scales of individual particles, turbulence and the bottom boundary layer to gain a better understanding of the fundamental dynamics of flocculation and their impact on fine-grained sediment transport.

In recent decades, oil spill contamination has tended to occur more commonly in deltaic and estuarial systems. The management of oil spillages has been a major challenge in the surrounding deltas due to the highly sensitivity nature of deltaic ecosystems. Many deltas have an abundance of clay minerals that can flocculate, and these play an important role in determining the transport of spilled oil contamination and its eventual fate, particularly given that suspended sediment and microbial activities are often prevalent and diverse in natural environments. The primary work presented here focuses on laboratory experimental studies that help develop improved parameterizations of flocculation processes for oil-sediment-biogeochemical modeling. Oil-mineral flocs (OMA) have been successfully created from a series of laboratory flocculation experiments. A floc video instrument LabSFLOC-2 has been adopted for the first time to study the settling dynamics of OMAs. Experimental results reveal OMAs can easily form in any oil, cohesive sediment, and seawater mixtures. However, Kaolin and Bentonite forms dramatically different OMA structures, which leads to their variable characteristics. In the Bentonite clay cases, the oil flocs tend to be much larger and with higher densities than those in Kaolin clay cases, resulting in significant variability of flocs settling velocities.