Sediments off the eastern United States vary markedly in texture — the size, shape, and arrangement of their grains.  However, for descriptive purposes, it is typically most useful to classify these sediments according to their grain-size distributions.  Starting in 1962, the U.S. Geological Survey and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution began a joint program to study the marine geology of the continental margin off the Atlantic coast of the United States. As part of this program and numerous subsequent projects, thousands of sediment samples were collected and analyzed for particle size.

 

            The purpose of this report is to describe the field methods used to collect marine sediment samples and the laboratory methods used to determine and characterize the grain-size distributions, to present these data in several flat-file formats that can be readily employed by interested parties, and to provide referenceable verified data and metadata to an Access relational database being developed as part of the USGS Coastal and Marine Geology Program’s Aggregates Project. To these ends, the report is divided into three sections: the first discusses procedures, the second contains the data, and the third provides the ability to use desktop geographic mapping tools to visualize the sediment distributions.

 

 

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