Burial of organic carbon and carbonate on inner shelf of the northern South China Sea during the postglacial period

Two vibrocores from the inner shelf off Hong Kong are investigated to compare the contents of organic and inorganic carbon in postglacial sediments. The compositions of organic elements and carbonate are highly variable in the core sediments, but overall drop within the compositional ranges of modern seabed sediments in the Zhujiang estuarine and its shelf area. The Holocene sediments in the inner shelf have never been subject to subaerial exposure and the organic matter and carbonate can be preserved well. The burial of carbon in river-dominated shelf environments is highly dependent on the river flux with time. Nevertheless, it is difficult to establish a simple relationship between carbon burial in sediments in relation to climatic changes of basin-wide scale due to complex controls of production, transport and deposition of organic matter and carbonate. Our study suggests that the organic carbon to nitrogen ratio can not reliably identify the sources of depositional organic matters because of selective decomposition of organic matter components during humification and sedimentation. Caution is therefore needed in using organic elemental compositions as indicators of organic matter sources and paleoenvironmental changes in the East Asian continental shelves where intense river-sea interaction and variable carbon flux in geologic record occur. © Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH 2008.