Introduction Sedimentary evolution and river channel changes of large river delta (e.g. Huang River, Changjiang River) in response to environmental changes have been one of the key issues in global change research. Methods This study reconstructed sedimentary environment changes in the modern Yellow River Delta (YRD), based on grain size and elemental chemical analysis of two short cores (YDC and YDG) from the southern region...

Introduction The sediments of the Yellow River delta record the environmental changes in the Yellow River basin on a long time scale and are sensitive to the river diversion and sedimentary environment evolution. Methods In this study, cores YDC and YDG in the delta near the estuary of the Yellow River since 1976 were taken as the research object, and the parameterized end-member analysis model was used to analyze the grain-si...

In this study, we collected surface sediments from the mainstream and major tributaries of the Yangtze River to systematically analyse their magnetic properties, and discuss the implications for tracing source–sink process of fluvio-clastic materials. Our results showed that the surface sediments from tributaries in the upper basin had a significantly higher content of ferromagnetic minerals and coarser grain sizes than that i...

Different from the continuous development of many river deltas since the major Holocene transgression, the modern Yellow River delta (YRD) remained for nearly 1000 years (from 893 AD to 1855 AD) in an abandonment state, until after 1855 AD when it was buried after the Yellow River entered the sea via Lijin. In this study we used optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating and grain size and sedimentary facies analysis of fo...

Due to remarkable reduction of sediment supply, the vulnerability of Yellow River deltaic system increased and ecological impacts occurred to some extent. To have a comprehensive and quantitative understanding of the morphological evolution of deltas, surficial sediments of tidal flat along the abandoned southern Yellow River sub-delta and two adjacent coastal units were systematically collected and evaluated by grain-size ana...