Downstream variation in bed sediment size along the East Carpathian rivers: evidence of the role of sediment sources

Abstract

AbstractTaking as an example six main rivers that drain the western flank of the Eastern Carpathians, a conceptual model has been developed, according to which fluvial bed sediment bimodality can be explained by the overlapping of two grain size distribution curves of different origins.Thus, for Carpathian tributaries of the Siret, coarse gravel joins an unimodal distribution presenting a right skewness with enhanced downstream fining. The source of the coarse material distributions is autohtonous (by abrasion and hydraulic sorting mechanisms). A second distribution with a sandy mode is, in general, skewed to the left. The source of the second distribution is allohtonous (the quantity of sand that reaches the river‐bed through the erosion of the hillslope basin terrains). The intersection of the two distributions occurs in the area of the 0·5–8 mm fractions, where, in fact, the right skewness (for gravel) and left skewness (for sand) histogram tails meet. This also explains the lack of particles in the 0·5–8 mm interval. For rivers where fine sediment sources are low, the 0·5–8 mm fractions have a higher proportion than the fractions under 1 mm.For the Siret River itself, bed sediment bimodality is greatly enhanced due to the fact that the second mode is more than 25% of the full sample. As opposed to its tributaries, the source of the first mode, of gravel, is allohtonous to the Siret river, generated by the massive input of coarse sediment through the Carpathian tributaries, while the second mode, of the sands, is local. In this case we can also observe that the two distributions of particles of different origins overlap in the 0·5–8 mm fraction domain, creating the illusion of ‘particle lack’ in the fluvial bed sediments. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.