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Sediment cores from river dams as flood archives

Frank W. Junge, Karl Jendryschik, Peter Morgenstern, Hanns-Christian Treutler, Lutz Zerling

 Abstract

Studies of sediment cores originating from a dam of the River Mulde near Bitterfeld (Saxony-An­halt, Germany) confirmed that river dams act as excellent archives of flood events. The records were performed by significant changes of the composition and quality of suspended matter and sediment. To combine the investigated sediment core with a reliable time scale, suitable reference data (e.g. radionuclides, geochemical markers) were included into the study. Subsequently, flow data of the Mulde (from 1975 up to now) were used to assign specific floods (>300 m³/s) to the event layers detected in the sediment cores. In addition to this, further time markers were in­spected towards a more reliable ad­justment of the time scale. In detail we made use of the ¹³⁷Cs activity maximum (caused by Chernobyl fallout), as well as of the drop in organic pollution (fol­lowing the col­lapse of East Germany’s industrial sector 1989/90), and finally of the decrease in the con­centration levels of elements and isotopes (a consequence of the reduced activities of mines and metallurgical plants in the River Mulde catchment).