Estuary without a River

[guernseyman]

Funny to think that the English Channel was once an estuary , a marsh, and you could walk over from Le Continent
About 5 hours would do it I imagine

Before the sea intruded, a super-river flowed along the English Channel. It included the outflows from the Rivers Thames, Seine, and Rhine, and others, of course.
It is now called the River Hurd, and its path is clearly visible in depth charts and is called the Hurd Deep.

 

[Blueboatman]

Before the sea intruded, a super-river flowed along the English Channel. It included the outflows from the Rivers Thames, Seine, and Rhine, and others, of course.
It is now called the River Hurd, and its path is clearly visible in depth charts and is called the Hurd Deep.

Interesting
Thank you

 

[Adios]

To my mind a bar is a shallowing at the entrance (exit?) of a river, ria etc. , rather than (necessarily) a narrowing. This is typically caused by a slowing of the flow of the river as it widens and/or meets the sea, leading to the depositing of some of the sediment that is carried by the flow at higher speeds. Salcome bar is a (relatively wide) example of this.

I threw my hands up in defeat when it stated the example of a ria is the severn estuary. That certainly has a widening and deposit of silt. I wonder if this definition is one that actually no one is really clear on.

p.s. I've just learnt that Orford Ness is described as a 'cuspate foreland', and the latter is defined as being primarily the result of longshore drift of material along the coast.

Its the sister of Blakeney Point in Norfolk. At some point on the NE corner of the Norfolk coast the drift switches and goes northwards to end at Blakeney.

 

[Lodestone]

It's not something I had thought about, but it appears that the essential part of an estuary's definition is the mixing of seawater with the river water, as in :
"An estuary is a partially enclosed, coastal water body where freshwater from rivers and streams mixes with salt water from the ocean. Estuaries, and their surrounding lands, are places of transition from land to sea."
In that sense, Lodestone is correct, although non-tidal mixing may occur in varying degrees, such as in my example. I think that what he possibly means is that rivers in the Baltic often flow into the sea without widening at their mouths or change in the land form, which would match my naive notion of an estuary.

Yes you're right. My post was only a light-hearted one, simply meant to highlight an apparent opposite rather than being geomorphologically correct. My memory is that some rivers simply have a sort of T-junction with the sea. No obvious transition zone at all.