Arthur Kill
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The Arthur Kill (from the Middle Dutch word kille, meaning "riverbed" or "water channel") is a tidal strait separating Staten Island from mainland New Jersey, USA. Throughout history, it has also been known as Staten Island Sound.
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[edit] Description
The channel is approximately 10 miles (16 km) long and connects Raritan Bay on its south end with Newark Bay on the north. Along the New Jersey side it is primarily lined with industrial sites, whereas on the Staten Island side, it is primarily lined with salt marshes.
A heavily used marine channel, it provides access for ocean-going container ships to Port Newark and to industrial facilities along the channel itself.
It also provides the primary marine access to the now-closed Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
The channel is dredged periodically to a depth between 35–37 feet (11 m) and a width of 600 feet (183 m) to maintain its usefulness for commercial ship passage.
Because of the complex nature of the tides in New York Harbor near the mouth of the Hudson River, the hydrology of the Arthur Kill is still an open subject. In particular, the net flow of the channel is not well established.
It is spanned by the Goethals Bridge and the Outerbridge Crossing, as well as by the Arthur Kill Vertical Lift Bridge, the largest bridge of its type in the United States.
It contains two small uninhabited islands, Prall's Island and the Isle of Meadows, both of which belong to the borough of Staten Island.
[edit] Geology
The Arthur Kill is an abandoned river channel carved by an ancestral phase of the Hudson River resulting from the blockage of the main channel of the Hudson at the Verrazano Narrows by moraine or ice. The size of the Arthur Kill channel is large, suggesting that it was, for a time, the primary drainage from the region. However, it was not a primary drainage for long because the river did not have enough time to carve a broad flood plain.
(Source: U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey)
