Surface sediment and seismic reflection profiling, outer Newport Submarine Canyon, Southern California continental borderland

Newport submarine canyon, a small south-trending feature, forms the division between the wide San Pedro shelf and the narrow Orange County shelf at a major topographic reentrant, the San Diego Trough. In part, the location of the canyon system was controlled by splays of the Newport-Inglewood Fault zone. The canyon system was incised into the continental shelf and slope by the ancestral Santa Ana River during the Pleistocene low sea level stands. Fifty-one samples were collected and analyzed for grain-size, carbon, and trace metals for this study. In addition, twenty-eight aloquats from the Bureau of Land Management Baseline study were obtained and reanalyzed for carbon and trace metals. Fifty grainsize analyses from the BLM study and the Lee study were converted to moment measure statistics. Over 55 line km of 3.5 kHz high resolution profiler data and 36 line km of intermediate resolution "boomer" data were examined for the seismic stratigraphic studies. (See more in text.)