Sediment distribution around coral area at Bidong Island

Abstract

A study was carried out around the Bidong Island in order to determine the general characteristic, grain size distribution of the sediments and comparison was made between these different areas of coral reef and non-reef areas. Samplings were conducted two times at each station. The first and second sampling was done on 25th - 27th March 2010 and 8th - 10th July 2010 that caring out along the Bidong Island area. Sediment samples were collected from 35 stations and three stations from them is from the coral area. Then, they are analyzed for their sedimentological characteristic i.e. means size, sorting, skewness and kurtosis by using dry sieving method and particle size analysis. The sediment mean size value ranged between -0.10 - 2.00 for the first sampling and -0.310 - 1.7710 for the second sampling. In this study, grain size distribution for all station of study area indicates that some differentation between station at coral reef area and non-coral reef area. Generally, the sediments in the study area consist mostly of coarse to fine particles. The major portions of the sediment are negatively skewed. This indicates that the study area is under the influence of the rather strong wave and current action.