Terrigenous sediment provenances and transportation mechanisms in the Okinawa Trough during the mid-to-late Holocene

The Okinawa Trough has received large amounts of detrital material from surrounding continentals and islands. However, the spatiotemporal evolution of provenance characteristics and its governing mechanisms during the mid-to-late Holocene remain inadequately constrained. In this study, based on AMS¹⁴C dating, rare earth elements and clay-sized Sr-Nd-Pb isotopes of core N029-13 were compiled to investigate provenance composition in the Northern Okinawa Trough during the mid-to-late Holocene. The results indicated that fine-grained detrital material in the Northern Okinawa mainly came from the Yellow River, and coarse-grained detrital material probably came from the Kyushu Island. Furthermore, comprehensive comparison with other published data revealed that sediments in the central and southern Okinawa Trough were dominated by detrital material from the Yangtze River and the Taiwan Island. With the influence of the East Asian winter monsoon, the Yangtze-derived detrital material was transported into the Okinawa Trough via the East China Sea shelf, the continental slope and the submarine canyons, whereas Taiwan-derived detrital material was transported northward by the Kuroshio Current.