Invited Research ArticleQuantitative reconstruction of Holocene sediment source variations in the Yellow and northern East China Seas and their forcings
Introduction
The East Asian marginal seas form a transition between the world's largest continent and its largest ocean, representing major sediment repositories of information on an interaction between the two realms, with a wide variance in their responses to climatic and environmental changes. The Yellow and northern East China Seas (YECSs, Fig. 1a) are characterized by broad continental shelves and huge terrigenous sediment inputs from the largest and most turbid rivers on Earth (e.g., Huanghe, Changjiang, and several small Korean rivers) (Milliman and Meade, 1983). These terrigenous sediments form several unique muddy depositional patches and belts on the shelves that are basically determined by diverse riverine sediment sources with various spectrums of bedrock compositions, old deltaic sediment shifts, complicated transport processes associated with strong tidal rearrangement, and intricate coastal-shelf current patterns that include historical variations of the Kuroshio (Yang et al., 2003; Lim et al., 2007, Lim et al., 2015a; Bain et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2014). This complexity in the formation of the shelf muddy deposits makes the YECSs an ideal natural laboratory for the study of sediment source-to-sink dynamics and land–sea interactions during the late Quaternary (e.g., Gao and Collins, 2014; Li et al., 2014a, Li et al., 2016a; Yang et al., 2014b; Wang et al., 2019).
In view of this, the sediment source-to-sink and related depositional processes in the YECSs have been widely studied over the past decades, and several plausible explanations have been proposed. However, there is still an ongoing and controversial debate about the source discrimination and dispersal pattern of the sediments (Yang et al., 2003; Lim et al., 2006; Bain et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2014). For example, notwithstanding the notion that the Yellow Sea sediments are mostly derived from Chinese rivers (e.g., Milliman et al., 1985; Ren and Shi, 1986; Alexander et al., 1991; Park and Khim, 1992), there have been little evidence of the CR sediment transports to the eastern portion of the Yellow Sea. In fact, there is growing evidence for a greater contribution of Korean river-sourced sediments to the eastern and even central portions of the sea (e.g., Lee and Chu, 2001; Chough et al., 2002; Li et al., 2014b; Lim et al., 2015a; Rao et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2014). Further, recent findings reveal more complicated source origins, as can be seen from the central region of the Yellow Sea (e.g., Zhao et al., 1990, Zhao et al., 1997; Wei et al., 2003; Lim et al., 2007; Li et al., 2014b; Wang et al., 2014) and as far as the Korean coastal zone (Lim et al., 2007, Lim et al., 2013; Cho et al., 2015; Um et al., 2015). With such oceanographic and sedimentological complexity, provenance identification of the YECS sediments has been a challenge; in particular, information on the source-to-sink transport pathways within the YECS basin and how the sediment supply rate from those sources have changed over time is still limited. Thus, there remains a clear need to continue refining and scrutinizing quantitative examinations on the YECS sediment fingerprints for improving the robustness of source discrimination.
Efforts over the past decades have focused on development of various geochemical and mineralogical proxies to identify the source of sediments in the YECSs. For example, higher ratios of smectite, illite/smectite and kaolinite plus chlorite have been suggested as typical characteristics of Huanghe- and Changjiang-derived, and western Korea river-derived sediments (especially <2 μm), respectively (Wei et al., 2003; Lan et al., 2012; Li et al., 2014b; Cho et al., 2015; Lim et al., 2015a; Lu et al., 2015; Koo et al., 2018 and reference therein). However, Yang et al. (2003) and Shi et al. (2012) reported very irregular distribution patterns of clay mineral contents, which has raised concerns over the applicability of smectite for the discrimination between Chinese and Korean river sediments. In addition, some conservative elements (e.g., Zr, Th, Hf, Nb, and Sc) and rare earth elements (REE) are well accepted as reliable provenance tracers, as they are mainly detrital components, reflecting their source origins (Yang et al., 2003, Yang et al., 2004a; Lim et al., 2006, Lim et al., 2013; Yang and Youn, 2007; Shi et al., 2012; Xu et al., 2012; Youn and Kim, 2011; Dou et al., 2014, Dou et al., 2015; Ai et al., 2020). Especially, light−/heavy-REE ratios have been used to discriminate the KR (or CR) sediments in the YECSs (Xu et al., 2019; Lim et al., 2014 and reference therein; Um et al., 2015), and further Jung et al. (2016) have investigated REE fractionation ratios of the YECSs sediments to quantify sediment source contributions. In several studies, strontium (Sr) and neodymium (Nd) isotopes also have been used as reliable source tracer in the YECSs (Lim et al., 2015b; Hu et al., 2018; Huang et al., 2019); that is, CR sediments were more radiogenic in 143Nd/144Nd, but less radiogenic in 87Sr/86Sr compared with KR sediments. Besides, magnetic susceptibility may have potential as source discrimination proxy in the Yellow Sea because of significant differences in their spatial-temporal distributions, reflecting diverse sediment sources (Wang et al., 2010, Wang et al., 2014, Wang et al., 2017). Despite these efforts, existing works using these fingerprints of the YECS sediments have produced rather equivocal signals (Yang et al., 2003; Lim et al., 2006), and sediment sources for the entire YECS region have not been quantified, primarily due to a lack of reasonable and practicable estimation methods.
Recently, Lim et al., 2006, Lim et al., 2015a recognized a significant potential of some alkaline earth elements including Mg and Fe as elemental fingerprints in identifying different sources of fine-grained YECS sediments. By implementing the preliminary work of Lim et al. (2006), we propose an alternative approach of the YECS sediment source quantification based on the advanced AlMg regression model, with the aim to increase its application effectiveness. To support this overview, we explored spatiotemporal variations of the YECS sediment source apportionments by applying this tracing approach to historic sedimentary deposits as well as contemporary spatial sediments over the region. The present study provides a broader understanding of the present- and paleo-depositional systems of the YECSs, successfully capturing land–ocean interactions and paleoenvironmental changes in the northwestern Pacific margin during the Holocene.
Section snippets
Materials and methods
For this study, a total of 399 surface sediment samples from the coastal and shelf zones of the YECSs, and 14 sediment cores from the several mud patches (Central Yellow Sea Mud, CYSM: 2 cores, Southeastern Yellow Sea Mud, SEYSM: 4 cores, East China Sea Distal Mud, ECSDM: 2 cores, and Korean coastal zone: 6 cores) have been investigated (Fig. 1b). For an improved demonstration of land–ocean interactions and paleoenvironmental changes in the YECS regime, we applied a new fingerprinting technique
AlMg regression analysis for sediment fingerprinting and source apportionment
We performed an elemental compositional analysis on all YECS sediment samples for more robust and accurate data acquisition and interpretation, in an attempt to improve sensitivity of the fingerprint method established by the pioneering work of Lim et al. (2006). Al2O3 and MgO contents in the YECS surface and core sediments ranged from 6.20% to 21.11% and 0.18% to 3.29%, respectively, which correspond well with variations in the mean grain-size distributions (Fig. 2), showing that sediment
Conclusions
In this study, we analyzed the Al and Mg contents of 399 surface sediments from the coastal and shelf zones of the YECSs and 14 sediment cores (n = 310 subsamples) from the several mud patches to illustrate spatiotemporal variations of the sediment sources and elucidate their major controlling mechanisms. Notably, the correlation of Mg with Al displays different linear regression trends for KR and CR sediment groups, enabling the source areas to be differentiated more clearly in the YECSs. For
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by Korea Institute of Ocean & Technology (KIOST) research program (Grant no. PE99862). The sediment samples for this work were provided by the Library of Marine Samples (LiMS) of Korea Institute of Ocean Science & Technology, Korea. The authors thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their careful reading of our manuscript and their constructive comments and suggestions.
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