Impact of coastal marsh eco-geomorphologic change on the prediction of
saltwater intrusion under future sea level rise
Abstract
Coastal saltwater intrusion (SWI) is one key factor affecting the
hydrology, nutrient transport, and biogeochemistry of coastal marsh
landscapes. Future climate change, especially intensified sea level rise
(SLR), is expected to trigger SWI to encroach coastal freshwater
aquifers more intensively. Numerous studies have investigated
decadal/century scale SWI under SLR by assuming a static coastal
landscape topography. However, coastal marshes are highly dynamic
systems in response to SLR, and the impact of coastal marsh evolution on
SWI has received very little attention. Thus, this study investigated
how coastal marsh evolution affects future SWI with a physically-based
coastal hydro-eco-geomorphologic model, ATS (Advanced Terrestrial
Simulator). Our synthetic modeling experiments showed that it is very
likely that the marsh elevation increases with future SLR, and a
depression zone is formed due to the different marsh accretion rates
between the ocean boundary and the inland. We found that, compared to
the cases without marsh evolution, the marsh accretion may significantly
reduce the surface saltwater inflow at the ocean boundary, and the
evolved topographic depression zone may prolong the residence time of
surface ponding saltwater, which causes distinct subsurface salinity
distributions. We also found that the marshland may become more
sensitive to the upland groundwater table that controls the freshwater
flux to the marshes, compared with the cases without marsh evolution.
This study demonstrates the importance of marsh evolution to the
freshwater-saltwater interaction under sea level rise and can help
improve our predictive understanding of the vulnerability of the coastal
freshwater system to sea level rise.