Century-scale high-resolution black carbon records in sediment cores from the South Yellow Sea, China -- Journal of Oceanology and Limnology,2018,36(1):114-127

	Cite this paper:
	XU Xiaoming, HONG Yuehui, ZHOU Qianzhi, LIU Jinzhong, YUAN Lirong, WANG Jianghai. Century-scale high-resolution black carbon records in sediment cores from the South Yellow Sea, China[J]. Journal of Oceanology and Limnology, 2018, 36(1): 114-127

Century-scale high-resolution black carbon records in sediment cores from the South Yellow Sea, China

XU Xiaoming¹, HONG Yuehui¹, ZHOU Qianzhi¹, LIU Jinzhong², YUAN Lirong¹, WANG Jianghai¹

1 Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Marine Resources and Coastal Engineering/South China Sea Bioresource Exploitation and Utilization Collaborative Innovation Center, School of Marine Sciences, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China;
2 Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou 510640, China

Abstract:

Black carbon (BC) has received increasing attention in the last 20 years because it is not only an absorbent of toxic pollutants but also a greenhouse substance, preserving fire-history records, and more importantly, acting as an indicator of biogeochemical cycles and global changes. By adopting an improved chemothermal oxidation method (WXY), this study reconstructed the century-scale high-resolution records of BC deposition from two fine-grained sediment cores collected from the Yellow Sea Cold Water Mass in the South Yellow Sea. The BC records were divided into five stages, which exhibited specific sequences with three BC peaks at approximately 1891, 1921, and 2007 AD, representing times at which the first heavy storms appeared just after the termination of long-term droughts. The significant correlation between the times of the BC peaks in the cores and heavy storms in the area of the Huanghe (Yellow) River demonstrated that BC peaks could result from markedly strengthened sedimentation due to surface runoff, which augmented the atmospheric deposition. Stable carbon isotope analysis indicated that the evident increase in carbon isotope ratios of BC in Stage 5 might have resulted from the input of weathered rock-derived graphitic carbon cardinally induced by the annual anthropogenic modulation of water-borne sediment in the Huanghe River since 2005 AD. Numerical calculations demonstrated that the input fraction of graphitic carbon was 22.97% for Stage 5, whereas no graphitic carbon entered during Stages 1 and 3. The obtained data provide new and important understanding of the source-sink history of BC in the Yellow Sea.

Key words: black carbon|sediment|stable carbon isotope|total organic carbon|Yellow Sea

Received: 2016-08-11 Revised: 2016-09-12

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