Abstract
Purpose
The sediment dynamics of (peri-)glacial catchments can be highly variable and complex. Understanding these dynamics and their underlying causes is not only of interest from a scientific perspective but also required to address the practical problems with which they are often associated. In order to better understand the sediment dynamics of glaciated mountainous catchments, suspended sediment fluxes in the 9.1 km2 Djankuat catchment (North Caucasus, Russia) were monitored intensively during the 2017 ablation season.
Materials and methods
The intra-event suspended sediment dynamics were studied using a newly proposed simple hysteresis index (SHI), quantifying to what extent evolutions in sediment concentration are characterized by a clockwise or anticlockwise hysteresis loop.
Results and discussion
The resulting catchment suspended sediment yield was 1033 t km−2 year−1, with the glacier itself contributing 72% of the suspended sediment load. However, during rainfall events, also hillslope erosion in the proglacial area became a very significant sediment source. Clockwise hysteresis loops occurred in 61.8% of the events, while anticlockwise in 11.8%. On the other hand, only 47.8% of the total suspended sediment flux was transported during clockwise events. Our observations clearly indicate that events showing a stronger clockwise pattern (i.e., a higher SHI) are associated with a larger sediment input from the proglacial area.
Conclusions
Overall, our results provide data and insights on sediment dynamics in an understudied environment. They illustrate that the type and characteristics of sediment concentration hysteresis loops are to some extent linked to the dominant sediment sources during the event. As such, the proposed methodology and SHI may also help with a better understanding of sediment dynamics in other environments.
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Data availability
Reproducible R code is available at the GitHub repository (https://github.com/atsyplenkov/intra-event-djankuat). Contact Anatoly Tsyplenkov (atsyplenkov@gmail.com) for more information.
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Acknowledgments
This study was conducted within the project of the Russian Scientific Foundation No. 19-17-00181 and a stay with an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility scholarship. This study contributes to the State Task no. 0148- 2019-0005, Institute of Geography RAS. The help of Ekaterina Rets, Andrey Smirnov, Pavel Toropov, Varvara Bazilova, Anna Avilova, Ekaterina Kornilova, and all other students who helped with the collection and processing of the field data is gratefully acknowledged.
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This study was funded by project of the Russian Scientific Foundation No. 19-17-00181.
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Conceptualization: Matthias Vanmaercke, Anatoly Tsyplenkov, Valentin Golosov; Methodology: Matthias Vanmaercke, Anatoly Tsyplenkov; Data collection and analyses: Anatoly Tsyplenkov with input from Matthias Vanmaercke; Writing: Anatoly Tsyplenkov, Matthias Vanmaercke, Valentin Golosov; Funding acquisition: Valentin Golosov, Sergey Chalov; Resources: Sergey Chalov; Supervision: Valentin Golosov, Matthias Vanmaercke.
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Tsyplenkov, A., Vanmaercke, M., Golosov, V. et al. Suspended sediment budget and intra-event sediment dynamics of a small glaciated mountainous catchment in the Northern Caucasus. J Soils Sediments 20, 3266–3281 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11368-020-02633-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11368-020-02633-z