19-979: The Mississippi Sound is a sound along the Gulf Coast of the United States . It runs east-west along the southern coasts of Mississippi and Alabama , from the mouth of the Pearl River at the Mississippi-Louisiana state border to the Dauphin Island Bridge , a distance of about 90 miles (145 km). The sound is separated from the Gulf on its southern side by the Mississippi–Alabama barrier islands : Cat , Ship , Horn , West Petit Bois (formerly known as Sand Island), Petit Bois , and Dauphin . Ship, Horn, West Petit Bois and Petit Bois Islands are part of
38-576: A fjord ; or a narrow sea channel or an ocean channel between two land masses, such as a strait ; or also a lagoon between a barrier island and the mainland. A sound is often formed by the seas flooding a river valley . This produces a long inlet where the sloping valley hillsides descend to sea-level and continue beneath the water to form a sloping sea floor. These sounds are more appropriately called rias . The Marlborough Sounds in New Zealand are good examples of this type of formation. Sometimes
57-526: A protected anchorage. It can be part of most large islands. In the more general northern European usage, a sound is a strait or the narrowest part of a strait. In Scandinavia and around the Baltic Sea , there are more than a hundred straits named Sund , mostly named for the island they separate from the continent or a larger island. In contrast, the Sound is the common international short name for Øresund,
76-550: A sound is produced by a glacier carving out a valley on a coast then receding, or the sea invading a glacier valley. The glacier produces a sound that often has steep, near vertical sides that extend deep underwater. The sea floor is often flat and deeper at the landward end than the seaward end, due to glacial moraine deposits. This type of sound is more properly termed a fjord (or fiord). The sounds in Fiordland , New Zealand, have been formed this way. A sound generally connotes
95-405: Is a coastline having several parallel rias separated by prominent ridges, extending a distance inland. The sea level change that caused the submergence of a river valley may be either eustatic (where global sea levels rise), or isostatic (where the local land sinks). The result is often a very large estuary at the mouth of a relatively insignificant river (or else sediments would quickly fill
114-508: Is inherited from the dendritic drainage pattern of the flooded river valley. The drowning of river valleys along a stretch of coast and formation of rias results in an extremely irregular and indented coastline. Often, there are naturally occurring islands, which are summits of partly submerged, pre-existing hill peaks. (Islands may also be artificial, such as those constructed for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel .) A ria coast
133-542: Is mainly used for place names in the Baltic Sea, like Fehmarnsund , Strelasund , and Stralsund . Ria A ria ( / ˈ r iː ə / ; Galician : ría , feminine noun derived from río , river) is a coastal inlet formed by the partial submergence of an unglaciated river valley . It is a drowned river valley that remains open to the sea. Typically rias have a dendritic , treelike outline although they can be straight and without significant branches. This pattern
152-639: The English noun sin , German Sünde ("apart from God's law"), and Swedish synd . English has also the adjective "asunder" and the noun "sundry', and Swedish has the adjective sönder ("broken"). In Swedish and in both Norwegian languages , "sund" is the general term for any strait. In Danish, Swedish and Nynorsk , it is even part of names worldwide, such as in Swedish "Berings sund" and "Gibraltar sund", and in Nynorsk "Beringsundet" and "Gibraltarsundet". In German "Sund"
171-634: The Gulf of Mexico from the mainland, along much of the gulf coasts of Alabama and Mississippi . The term sound is derived from the Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse word sund , which also means " swimming ". The word sund is also documented in Old Norse and Old English as meaning "gap" (or "narrow access"). This suggests a relation to verbs meaning "to separate", such as absondern and aussondern ( German ), söndra ( Swedish ), sondre ( Norwegian ), as well as
190-539: The project depth . A section west of Cat Island and the portion north of Dauphin Island rely on dredged channels marked by aids to navigation maintained by the US Coast Guard . Deepwater ports along the sound include Gulfport and Pascagoula . Dredged ship channels running basically north-south connect those ports to the Gulf of Mexico, running between pairs of the barrier islands . The Bay of St. Louis and Biloxi Bay on
209-538: The 2008 and 2011 openings of the floodgates of the Bonnet Carré Spillway the massive freshwater destroyed the oyster and crab populations and the authorities have undertaken cultch plantings to restore the fisheries in the western sound. The 2019 opening of the Bonnet Carré Spillway has resulted in seafood industry losses that exceed $ 200 million dollars. Sport fishing is year-round on charters as well as
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#1732845256143228-1014: The National Park Service's Gulf Islands National Seashore . Those islands separate the sound from the Gulf of Mexico . The sediment of the islands was created partly by the ancient Mississippi River when the St. Bernard Lobe of the Mississippi Delta was active over two thousand years ago. The expansion of the St. Bernard subdelta slowly isolated the Mississippi Sound from ocean dynamics of the open Gulf of Mexico. Traditional seafood harvests, particularly shellfish, have been curtailed recently due to declines in numbers and quality caused by pollution and weather related events such as hurricanes, flooding, or droughts. Federal and state authorities have various programs and regulations aimed at shellfish restoration and water quality monitoring for beachgoers. After
247-566: The U.S. state of Washington . It was also applied to bodies of open water not fully open to the ocean, such as Caamaño Sound or Queen Charlotte Sound in Canada; or broadenings or mergings at the openings of inlets, like Cross Sound in Alaska and Fitz Hugh Sound in British Columbia. Along the east coast and Gulf Coast of the United States, a number of bodies of water that separate islands from
266-574: The mainland are called "sounds". Long Island Sound separates Long Island from the eastern shores of the Bronx , Westchester County , and southern Connecticut . Similarly, in North Carolina , a number of large lagoons lie between the mainland and its barrier beaches, the Outer Banks . These include Pamlico Sound , Albemarle Sound , Bogue Sound , and several others. The Mississippi Sound separates
285-618: The narrow stretch of water that separates Denmark and Sweden , and is the main waterway between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea . It is also a colloquial short name, among others, for Plymouth Sound , England . In areas explored by the British in the late 18th century, particularly the northwest coast of North America, the term "sound" was applied to inlets containing large islands, such as Howe Sound in British Columbia and Puget Sound in
304-536: The nearshore. Large portions of the Mississippi Sound reach depths of about 20 feet (6 m). Part of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway traverses the sound with a project depth of 12 feet (4 m). The waterway, maintained by the US Army Corps of Engineers , is designed for towboat and barge traffic. Most of its route through the sound is merely an imaginary line through water whose depth exceeds
323-517: The northern side of the sound jut into mainland Mississippi. These bays drain the Wolf and Jourdan Rivers as well as the Bernard, Davis, and Turkey bayous. The Pascagoula River and the Pearl River flow into the sound. Sound (geography) In geography , a sound is a smaller body of water usually connected to a sea or an ocean. A sound may be an inlet that is deeper than a bight and wider than
342-596: The ria). The Kingsbridge Estuary in Devon , England, is an extreme example of a ria forming an estuary disproportionate to the size of its river; no significant river flows into it at all, only a number of small streams. The word ria comes from Galician ría which comes from río (river). Rias are present all along the Galician coast in Spain . As originally defined, the term was restricted to drowned river valleys cut parallel to
361-440: The structure of the country rock that was at right angles to the coastline. However the definition of ria was later expanded to other flooded river valleys regardless of the structure of the country rock. For a time European geomorphologists considered rias to include any broad estuarine river mouth, including fjords . These are long narrow inlets with steep sides or cliffs, created in a valley carved by glacial activity . In
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