A Review of Comminution Age Method and Its Potential Application in the East China Sea to Constrain the Time Scale of Sediment Source-to-Sink Process

The East China Sea(ECS) is a river-dominated epicontinental sea, linking the Asian continent to the northwestern Pacific via the large rivers originating from Tibetan Plateau. The relevant huge influx of riverine detritus has developed unique sedimentary systems in the ECS during the Quaternary, offering ideal terrestrial archives for reconstructing Quaternary paleoenvironmental changes and studying land-sea interactions. Overall, two characteristic river systems dominate the sedimentary systems and sediment source to sink transport patterns in the ECS, represented by the Changjiang(Yangtze River) and Huanghe(Yellow River) for the large river system and Taiwan rivers for the small river system. Given this, the sediments derived from both river systems bear distinct features in terms of parent rock lithology, provenance weathering and sediment transport. Previous studies mostly focus on either the ‘source' discrimination or the ‘sink' records of the sedimentary system in the ECS, while the source to sink process linking the land and sea, in particular its time scale, has been poorly understood. Here we introduce a newly-developed dating technique, the ‘comminution age' method, which offers a quantitative constraint on the time scale of sediment transfer from its ultimate source to the final depositional sink. This novel method is of great significance for improving our understanding on the earth surface processes including tectonic-climate driven weathering, and sediment recycling in relation to landscape evolution and marine environmental changes. The application of comminution age method in the ECS will provide important constraints on sediment source-to-sink process and more evidences for the construction of late Quaternary paleoenvironmental changes under these unique sedimentary systems.

Chaotic characters of the Yellow River Basin based on the sediment time series： An attempt to integrated research in geography

The sediment content of the Yellow River is resulted from the interactions of natural, economic, and social factors, so it includes some evolutive information of the Yellow River Basin system. Sediment contents from 1952 to 2007 on Toudaoguai, Tongguan, Huayuankou and Lijin sections along the river are chosen as the study time series, and correlation dimensions （D2）, Kolmogorov entropies （K2）, and Hurst indexes （H） of the time series were calculated. Correlation dimensions on Toudaoguai, Tongguan, Huayuankou, and Lijin sections are 3.24, 5.69, 6.57 and 7.34 respectively, and the Kolmogorov entropies are 0.13, 0.37, 0.40 and 0.38 respectively, which indicates that the systems controlled by different sections along the Yellow River are chaotic systems and the chaotic degrees increase gradually from the upper to lower section. The average predictable period of the sediment contents is 8 years on Toudaoguai section and 3 years on the other sections with the reciprocals of the Kolmogorov entropies. The more obvious the chaotic degree is, the shorter the average predictable period is. Hurst indexes on the sections are above 0.5, with the maximum of 0.86 on Tongguan section and the minimum of 0.68 on Toudaoguai section, which indicates that the time series have persistent trends in the average predictable period. Eight state variables and two control parameters are necessary to construct the dynamic model of the Yellow River Basin system.