Land-sea duel in the late Quaternary at the mouth of a small river with high sediment yield

Abstract

The transition between sedimentary environments is compressed along land-sea boundaries in space and time. At river mouths on high standing islands, sedimentary records with high temporal resolutions formed as a result of large sediment loads and pervasive post-glacial sea level rise. Here we report on sediment core records covering the late Quaternary from the mouth of a small mountainous river in Taiwan. Results show that the study site was initially terrestrial under fluvial control. Beginning at about 10,000yrBP (before present) the site became inundated by the rising sea and the environmental facies transitioned from a floodplain/incised river valley to a succession of marine environments, from shoreface to offshore. As the rising sea level came to a pause at 6000yrBP, fluvial processes became dominant and sediments began to aggrade at the river mouth. After 4500yrBP, the accumulated sediment began to prograde seaward, taking on the form of a river delta, and subtidal sand ridges appeared in the nearshore. This also introduces the deltaic development, which was limited by topography of the receiving basin. The chronology expresses the duel between sea level and fluvial processes that determined the depositional environments along the land-sea boundary at the study site.