RHYTHMITES PRESERVATION IN MACROTIDAL ESTUARINE ENVIRONMENTS : FROM UPSTREAM TO DOWNSTREAM ESTUARY

Estuaries are interface environments between continental and marine domains. The estuarine system classifications allow estuarine zonation based on the longitudinal distribution of hydrodynamic forcing relative energies (flow, tide and swell) which contribute to the hydrodynamics and sediment dynamics. The respective influence of hydrodynamic processes was represented by Dalrymple et al., 1992 (Fig. 1). The resulting hydrodynamics is highly variable and nonlinear in space but also in time: from seconds (swell) to multi-year (interannual variability of hydrological flows).