Holocene sea-level change on the central coast of Bohai Bay, China
2020
Abstract. To constrain models on global sea-level change regional proxy data
on coastal change are indispensable. Here, we reconstruct the Holocene
sea-level history of the northernmost China Sea shelf. This region is of
great interest owing to its apparent far-field position during the late
Quaternary, its broad shelf and its enormous sediment load supplied by the
Yellow River. This study generated 25 sea-level index points for the central
Bohai coastal plain through the study of 15 sediment cores and their
sedimentary facies, foraminiferal assemblages and radiocarbon dating the
basal peat. The observational data were compared with sea-level predictions
obtained from global glacio-isostatic adjustment (GIA) models and with published sea-level data from Sunda
shelf, Tahiti and Barbados. Our observational data indicate a phase of rapid
sea-level rise from c. −17 to −4 m between c. 10 and 5 ka with a peak
rise of 6.4 mm a −1 during 8.7 to 7.5 ka and slower rise of 1.9 mm a −1 during
7.5 to 5.3 ka followed by a phase of slow rise from 5 to 2 ka ( ∼0.4 mm a −1 from −3.58 m at 5.3 ka cal BP to −2.15 m at 2.3 ka cal BP). The comparison with the sea-level predictions for the study area
and the published sea-level data is insightful: in the early Holocene, Bohai
Bay's sea-level rise is dominated by a combination of the eustatic and the
water load components causing the levering of the broad shelf. In the
mid to late Holocene the rise is dominated by a combination of tectonic
subsidence and fluvial sediment load, which masks the mid-Holocene highstand
recorded elsewhere in the region.
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