Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Coastal and Estuarine Studies, Volume 39. Coastal regions, and particularly the transition zone between fresh and salt water called estuaries, continue to attract the interest of scientists and governments. In an age of growing awareness of interactive processes affecting the entire planet, those occuring at the frontier between the extensively manipulated continental home of the human race and the once-pristine world ocean merit such continued attention. Estuaries, however, are particularly complicated environments, with cycles of motion that may actually never be repetitive, and each estuary is somewhat different from its neighbours. Since the appearance of "Estuaries" (Lauff, 1967), other, mainly symposium- or workshop-inspired, volumes have been published (e.g. Cronin, 1975; Kennedy, 1980, 1982, 1984; Kjerfve, 1978, 1988; Ketchum, 1983; van de Kreeke, 1986; Wiley, 1976, 1978; Wolfe, 1986). It is difficult, however, to find accounts of the physical, biological, chemical and geological characteristics of individual estuaries all in one place, and large estuaries, such as Chesapeake Bay, Long Island Sound, the Strait of Georgia and the Skagerrak, seem not to have been treated as coherent entities. Nor has the St. Lawrence. |