Mississippi

Introduction

The mainland coastline of Mississippi is slightly curved and indented by embayments with small bayhead deltas (Otvos 1981). The hinterland has a series of emerged Quaternary terraces. Late Holocene marshlands and beaches fringe the estuarine shores of the mainland, and an extensive marshland on the SW coast surrounds remants of stranded late Holocene relict islands sev­eral metres high (Otvos 1998). The largest estuaries are in the lower Pearl and Pascagoula valleys, as well as St. Louis Bay and Biloxi Back Bay. The Pearl drainage basin has an area of 22,470 sq km that yields an average discharge of 282 m³/s. The Pascagoula-Leaf watershed, 24,600 sq km in area, has 354 m³/s discharge. Small estuaries occur in the mouths of the Biloxi, Jourdan, and Wolf Rivers, Graveline Bayou, and numerous smaller tidal creeks with minor freshwater discharge. Straddling the Alabama state line on the east are rapidly decaying marshlands that formed when the abandoned Escatawpa River delta...