Assessing modern river sediment discharge to the ocean using satellite gravimetry

Maxime Mouyen (), Laurent Longuevergne, Philippe Steer, Alain Crave, Jean-Michel Lemoine, Himanshu Save and Cécile Robin
Additional contact information
Maxime Mouyen: Univ Rennes, CNRS, Géosciences Rennes
Laurent Longuevergne: Univ Rennes, CNRS, Géosciences Rennes
Philippe Steer: Univ Rennes, CNRS, Géosciences Rennes
Alain Crave: Univ Rennes, CNRS, Géosciences Rennes
Jean-Michel Lemoine: CNES/GRGS
Himanshu Save: The University of Texas at Austin
Cécile Robin: Univ Rennes, CNRS, Géosciences Rennes

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Recent acceleration of sand extraction for anthropic use threatens the sustainability of this major resource. However, continental erosion and river transport, which produce sand and sediment in general, lack quantification at the global scale. Here, we develop a new geodetic method to infer the sediment discharge to ocean of the world’s largest rivers. It combines the spatial distribution of modern sedimentation zones with new high-resolution (~170 km) data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission launched in 2002. We obtain sediment discharges consistent with in situ measurements for the Amazon, Ganges-Brahmaputra, Changjiang, Indus, and Magdalena rivers. This new approach enables to quantitatively monitor the contemporary erosion of continental basins drained by rivers with large sediment discharges and paves the way toward a better understanding of how natural and anthropic changes influence landscape dynamics.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05921-y Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:9:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-018-05921-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-05921-y

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().