How tropical cyclone flooding caused erosion and dispersal of mercury-contaminated sediment in an urban estuary: The impact of Hurricane Harvey on Buffalo Bayou and the San Jacinto Estuary, Galveston Bay, USA.
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Hurricane Harvey (Harvey), a slow-moving storm, struck the Texas coast as a category 4 hurricane. Over the course of 53days, the floodwaters of Harvey delivered 14109 m3 of freshwater to Galveston Bay. This resulted in record flooding of Houston bayous and waterways, all of which drained into the San Jacinto Estuary (SJE,) with its main tributaries being Buffalo Bayou and the San Jacinto River. The lower SJE and lower Buffalo Bayou has experienced up to 3m of land subsidence in the past 100years and, as a result, prior to Hurricane Harvey, up to 2m of sediment within the upper seabed contained an archive of high concentrations of Total Hg (HgT) and other particle-bound and porewater contaminants. Within the SJE, Harvey eroded at least 48cm of the sediment column, resulting in the transport of an estimated 16.4106 tons of sediment and at least 2 tons of Hg into Galveston Bay. This eroded sediment was replaced by a Harvey storm deposit of 7.73106 tons of sediment and 0.96 tons within the SJE, mostly sourced from Buffalo Bayou. Considering that the frequency of slow-moving tropical cyclones capable of delivering devastating rainfall may be increasing, then one can expect that delivery of Hg and other contaminants from the archived sediment within urbanized estuaries will increase and that what happened during Harvey is a harbinger of what is to come.
