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Predicting sediment flux from continental shelf islands, southeastern China

  • Geology
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Abstract

Continental shelf islands are contributors of terrestrial sediment supply to shelf regions, and the sediment flux from these islands shall be quantified. We calculated the sediment flux of continental shelf islands in the southeastern China using two empirical equations under two preconditions. The first, the sediment load/yield of the islands has the same pattern as the adjacent small, mountainous rivers along the coastline; and the second, each of the islands was treated as a single catchment. The results show that the sediment supply from these islands reached an order of magnitude of 1 Mt/a, which is comparable to the supply from the local smaller rivers. A sensitivity analysis indicates that this value represents the lower limit of estimate; if the accurate amount of sub-catchments of any island is considered, then this value will be enhanced slightly. This study demonstrates that the sediment supply from continental shelf islands to oceans is an important factor affecting the regional sedimentation and, therefore, should be paid with attention.

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Data Availability Statement

In this study, three data sets were used to estimate the sediment flux from continental islands, SE China. The first is the parameters of environmental background setting of the 23 coastal catchments, including area, maximum relief, mean temperature, and mean rainfall. The second is the characteristic values of 26 hydrometric gauging stations of the rivers, including drainage area and sediment discharge. The third is the area coverage of the shelf islands that pertains to the dataset in Xia (2012). The data sources of the first and two categories are collected from published literatures (Table 1), mainly Zhang et al. (2015), Water Resources Department of People’s Republic of China (2017), and the Baidu Wikipedia (http://baike.baidu.com). The first two datasets are open to public readers, but the last dataset is not available and is privileged information belonging to the Ministry of Natural Resources of China.

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Acknowledgment

Anonymous reviewers are thanked for their reviews of the original manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Marine Technology, Guangdong Ocean University, Zhanjiang, 524088, China

    Gaocong Li

  2. Second Institute of Oceanography, Ministry of Natural Resources, Hangzhou, 310012, China

    Xiaoming Xia & Tinglu Cai

  3. State Key Laboratory for Estuarine and Coastal Research, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200241, China

    Jianjun Jia, Yaping Wang & Shu Gao

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  1. Gaocong Li
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  2. Xiaoming Xia
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  3. Jianjun Jia
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  4. Yaping Wang
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  6. Shu Gao
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Contributions

XIA Xiaoming, JIA Jianjun, and CAI Tilu produced the island’s dataset; GAO Shu, JIA Jianjun, and LI Gaocong conceived and posed the research question, and carried out the analysis, and LI Gaocong wrote the paper; LI Gaocong, WANG Yaping, and GAO Shu designed the study and interpreted the results. All authors commented on the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shu Gao.

Additional information

Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 41625021, 41876092, 41576095, 41906021)

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Li, G., Xia, X., Jia, J. et al. Predicting sediment flux from continental shelf islands, southeastern China. J. Ocean. Limnol. 39, 472–482 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00343-020-9333-0

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