Search

This review paper provides a brief review on the development of ideas in the fields of the sea level change of the ECS (East China Sea), the history of the Yangtze River entering the sea and paleochannels in the shelf of the ECS since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). The paper summarizes two opposite theories about the Yangtze River entering the sea during the LGM. One theory is that the Yangtze River input a lacustrine in the north of Jiangsu province which was defunct in middle Holocene, and the river was once dry. The other was that the Yangtze River still existed and entered into the Okinawa Trough during the LGM, but scholars share different opinions on which course the river ran across and which place the river input the trough. This paper concludes future work is to study the evolution of the Yangtze River and the paleoclimate and the corresponding events as a whole from the view of regional and even global change, and more attention should be paid to the study on mud sediment, the Yangtze River's response to the changes in climate and sea-level, and the channel metamorphosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zhang, L.; Xu, J., and Peng, Y., 2015. Neotectonic movement and seismic activity in the East China Sea. The East China Sea region in this paper mainly includes the continental shelf of East China Sea and Okinawa trough. The geological structure in the region basically belongs to the extension part of China's east mainland to the sea area. In Cenozoic, this area developed the East China Sea shelf basin, Diaoyu uplift fold zone, and Okinawa trough basin. Since East China Sea is located in the bonded zone of continental plate and the Philippines Sea plate, the neotectonics and the geological structure generated since the Middle Miocene are unique and complex. Basing on fully interpreting the related data and research achievements of previous researchers, this study profoundly analyzed and studied the characteristics of the neotectonics in East China Sea region from a perspective of tectonic landform, geological structure, and seismic activity etc. On this basis, it further discussed the dynamic conditions and seismic activity characteristics of neotectonics in East China Sea area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chen, Y. P., Xie, D. M., Zhang, C. K, Qian, X. S., 2013. Estimation of long-term wave statistics in the East China Sea. This study used a state-of-the-art approach to estimate the long-term wave statistics in the East China Sea. The wave climate in the past 60 years (1950-2009) was simulated by a third generation wave model driven by the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis wind data. Based on the statistical analysis of the numerical results, the mean wave fields and the extreme wave fields with 100-year and 50-year return period on the whole computational domain were obtained. The spatial variations of the wave fields show that the statistical waves decrease from south to north and from sea to coast in general, which can be associated with the local topography of the East China Sea. The seasonal variations show that the mean waves in the winter and autumn are slightly larger than those in the spring and summer, while the extreme waves in the summer are much larger than those in the other seasons, which is mainly due to the seasonal variation of monsoonal winds and the occurrence of typhoon events in the summer. The outputs of this paper are helpful to understand the distribution of mean and extreme waves in the East China Sea, and also useful to calculate the design waves in the coastal area if nearshore wave model like the SWAN model is introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research related to carbon geochemistry and biogeochemistry in the East China Sea is reviewed in this paper. The East China Sea is an annual net sink for atmospheric CO2 and a large net source of dissolved inorganic carbon to the ocean. The sea absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere in spring and summer and releases it in autumn and winter. The East China Sea is a CO2 sink in summer because Changjiang River freshwater flows into it. The net average sea-air interface carbon flux of the East China Sea is estimated to be about 4.3 × 106 t/y. Vertical carbon transport is mainly in the form of particulate organic carbon in spring; more than 98% of total carbon is transported in this form in surface water, and the number exceeds 68% in water near the bottom. In the southern East China Sea, the average particulate organic carbon inventory was about one-tenth that of the dissolved organic carbon. Research indicates that the southern Okinawa Trough is an important site for particulate organic carbon export from the shelf. The annual cross-shelf exports are estimated to be 414 and 106 Gmol/y for dissolved organic carbon and particulate organic carbon, respectively. Near-bottom transport could be the key process for shelf-to—deep sea export of biogenic and lithogenic particles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]