Determination of transfer time for sediments in alluvial plains using 238U-234U-230Th disequilibria: The case of the Ganges river system

Abstract

An approach to deriving the transfer time of sediments within alluvial plains by using the variation of the U-series nuclides in sediments collected along rivers is presented in this article and discussed in the light of new data from samples from different locations within the Ganges watershed and its outlet. These data indicate that the upstream-downstream variation of 238U-234U-230Th disequilibria in the sediments, with different variation trends for suspended and coarse-grained sediments, is probably a general feature of all Himalayan rivers flowing across the Indo-Gangetic plain. The data therefore confirm the occurrence of very different transfer times within the plain, depending on the sediments granulometry, with much shorter transfer time for the fine-grained (a few ky or less) than for the coarse-grained sediments (100 ky or more). A new solving approach, using a parallel stochastic Quantum-behaved Particle Swarm Optimization (p-QPSO), has been developed for identifying the unknown parameters of the model necessary for the determination of the transfer time. The data of sediments collected at the Ganges outlet show significant variations of the 234U/230Th activity ratios for the fine-grained sediment end-member collected in 2004 and 2008. Such variations indicate that the fine-grained sediments transit quickly (a year or less) within the plain. The highly variable activity ratios might be the result of quickly changing weathering intensities. Conversely, the U-Th variations observed for the 2004 and 2008 bedload from the Ganges basin cannot result from a short sedimentary transfer time. They probably result from the dredge sampling procedure, which might be influenced by local placer effects controlling the abundance of U and Th carrying minerals. Dredging may not allow the sampling of a representative bedload, hence it may cause an artificial mineralogical and, therefore, an U-Th variability for bedload sediments collected at different periods. At this stage, the transfer time uncertainty induced by this variability is difficult to assess.