Introduction
The coastlines of the Mid-Atlantic Bight in the eastern United States are backed by a coastal plain and fronted by a broad continental shelf, which is structurally a major Âcontinental margin geosyncline (the Baltimore Canyon Trough). This shelf is underlain by more than 10,000 m of sediment, the basal deposits dating back to the Triassic. The position of the present coastline in relation to the continental shelf varies from Virginia, where it stands near the outer edge of the continental shelf to northern New Jersey, where it stands close to the hard rock basement.
The reason for this variation is probably glaciotectonic. The northern end of the New Jersey coast is very close to the southernmost limit of the North American continental glacial ice sheet in Quaternary times. Many believe that a continental bulge formed, with isostatic upwarping in the area peripheral to the ice sheet at its maximum extent, and that with the waning of the ice sheet and its disappearance from...
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(2010). Atlantic Coast Central (USA) (Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey). In: Bird, E.C.F. (eds) Encyclopedia of the World's Coastal Landforms. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8639-7_14
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