Quantitative analysis of Holocene sediment source variations using elemental compositions in the Yellow and northern East China Seas (YECSs)

Abstract

Despite the fact that quantification of sediment source-to-sink dynamics in the Yellow Sea and northern East China Seas (YECSs) is essential to understand land-ocean interaction and depositional process in the northwestern Pacific continental margin, quantitative provenance estimation of the YECS sediments remains unresolved, owing to a lack of reliable sediment fingerprints. Here, we propose a novel sediment fingerprinting method based on the Al-Mg regression model to quantitatively analyze sediment source-to-sink transport process in the YECSs, and to elucidate its major controlling mechanism during the Holocene. The resulted model estimates successfully describe spatio-temporal variations in quantitative source apportionments, yielding an improved understanding of what pathways and sinks exist within the YECS basin, and how rates of sediment supply from adjacent rivers have changed over time. Our novel fingerprint-inferred provenance changes of the YECS sediments over the last 15 kyr witnessed clear signals which fit to the 4.2-ka cold-event in the northwestern Pacific margin under a strong influence of Kuroshio dynamics. The robust spatiotemporal coherence in the YECS sediment source-to-sink quantifications validates a unique potential of our model as a sediment fingerprinting method that may greatly benefit precise constraints on sediment composition, dispersal and provenance, as well as processes affecting sediment-routing systems, thereby opening up many avenues for advanced sediment provenance reconstruction over a wide variety of spatial and temporal scales.