Abstract:

Some continental margins can be regarded as ideal archives for the studies of Earth’s environmental changes and land-sea interactions because they well preserve the continuous sedimentary strata. Rivers as the link between land and sea, play a key role in transferring the environmental evolution information from land (source) to sea (sink) in the continental margins. Due to the complex buffering zones and transfer processes in the sediment routing systems, the ultimate fluxes and compositions of fluvial sediments into the sea and ocean may differ significantly from those derived from the provenances. In addition, different rivers bear much variable ways of environmental signal propagation, which deserves more research attentions. East Asian continental margin is characterized by river-dominated shallow shelf seas, with receiving huge sediment inputs from the large rivers such as the Changjiang (Yangtze) and Huanghe (Yellow) Rivers and from those small mountainous rivers in Taiwan. Thus, the East Asian continental margin is regarded as one of the ideal natural laboratories for the investigations of river source-to-sink processes and land-sea interactions on multiple temporal and spatial scales. For the better understanding of sediment provenances, origins and paleoenvironmental changes recorded in continental margins, we should adopt the research concepts of “source-to-sink” and earth system science, and better reveal the temporal and spatial variations of provenance compositions, and the environmental signal propagations from land to sea.