Introduction

Figure 1. Map showing location of Barnegat Bay–Little Egg Harbor estuary, New Jersey. Red box indicates study area extent. Base map modified from U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) 1:100,000 scale digital data overlaid with a USGS 10-meter resolution terrain model (Andrews and others, 2015a). Abbreviations: DE, Delaware; MD, Maryland; NJ, New Jersey; NY, New York; PA, Pennsylvania. [Click to enlarge]

Barnegat Bay–Little Egg Harbor (BBLEH) estuary along the coast of New Jersey (N.J., fig. 1) historically has been affected by degraded water quality, algal blooms, and seagrass loss, along with increases in oxygen stress, macroalgae, stinging nettles, and brown tide (Kennish, 2001). In response to the 2010 Governor’s Action Plan to clean up Barnegat Bay, the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Coastal and Marine Geology Program (CMGP) and New Jersey Water Science Center (NJWSC) partnered with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) in 2011 to begin a multidisciplinary research project to better understand the physical controls on water quality in the bay. The narrow back-barrier estuary is 71 kilometers (km) long and 6 km wide at its maximum. The estuary is bounded to the east by barrier islands and to the west by the mainland, and covers approximately 337 square kilometers (km²) with a mean depth of less than 1 meter (m). The scale of the estuary and the scope of the problems within it necessitated a multidisciplinary approach that included describing its physical characteristics (for example, depth, surface and subsurface sediment distribution, and the magnitude and directions of tidal currents) and modeling how those physical characteristics interact to affect the spatial variability of water quality in the BBLEH estuary. Between 2011 and 2013, scientists from CMGP offices in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and St. Petersburg, Florida mapped the seafloor of the BBLEH estuary. Data acquired with a suite of geophysical tools provided the first comprehensive look at the geological and morphological characteristics of the bay (Andrews and others, 2015a,b). However, this mapping effort included only surficial characterization of bay sediments; to verify the sub-surface geophysical data, sediment cores were required.

This report describes sedimentologic data from 18 vibracores collected from Barnegat Bay between May and August of 2014 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) on behalf of the USGS. The vibracores were collected in conjunction with an ongoing NRCS subaqueous soil survey for the BBLEH estuary. The data presented in this report, including descriptive core logs, core photographs, processed grain-size data, and Geographic Information System (GIS) data files, can be viewed or downloaded from the Data Products and Downloads page.