Anna Jalowska has been monitoring sediment storage on the Roanoke River floodplain for about three years. She has deployed feldspar marker beds and water-level loggers from the mouth of the river near Albemarle Sound to about 15 km up river on the floodplain. Her results show that floodplain sedimentation is dynamic. Some months she measures one or two centimeters of deposition, while other months that same amount of sediment has been eroded. During this trip in November, Anna’s primary adviser, Brent McKee, sampled about 1 meter of mud from the thalweg of the Roanoke River. The river channel itself could be an important temporary-storage site for sediment. Sediment-transport routes to basins are not direct; there are many layovers and at each stop the sediment is slightly altered.
