Heavy Mineral Compositions of Sediments in the Southern Okinawa Trough and Their Provenance-Tracing Implication

Heavy mineral assemblages have been widely used to effectively trace sediment sources. Heavy mineral assemblages are rarely used in research to trace sediment sources in the southern Okinawa Trough compared with geochemical proxies. In this study, the TESCAN Integrated Mineral Analyzer (TIMA) revealed the full-size heavy mineral assemblages in the five layers of the core sediment H4-S2 in the southern Okinawa Trough. During the past 700 years, the heavy mineral assemblages in the sediments of the southern Okinawa Trough were very similar to the East China Sea shelf/Yangtze River, mainly composed of mica and chlorite; dolomite; actinolite; and hematite/magnetite. The grain size distribution of heavy minerals is in the clay–sand range and mainly in silt. Actinolite and hornblende can indicate the supply of sediments from the East China Sea shelf/Yangtze River to the southern Okinawa Trough. Due to their complex sources, pyrite, epidote, and hematite/magnetite are not adequate indicators for distinguishing between the different provenance areas. Because previous studies have used a variety of analytical methods, especially using heavy liquids with different densities, dolomite cannot be used as a marker for sediments on the Yangtze River/East China Sea shelf. Therefore, the East China Sea shelf/Yangtze River is a vital provenance of sediments from the southern Okinawa Trough since the late Holocene period.