Characteristic of detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology in the southern Okinawa Trough and its implication for sediment provenance

The southern Okinawa Trough is the area with the fastest deposition rate since the Holocene, and its sediments record the evolution of provenance, Kuroshio and the East Asian monsoon. In this paper, detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology is used to study the provenance of H4-S2 sediments in the southern Okinawa Trough. By means of Kernel Density Estimation (KDE), Cumulative Age Distribution (CAD) and correlation analysis, the visual analysis and similarity test for potential provenances of two layers of sediments are carried out for the trough, and thus the chronology and provenance of detrital zircon revealed. The provenance analysis suggests that the detrital zircon in the sediments from the southern Okinawa Trough are sourced from the East China Sea shelf, Yangtze River and Lanyang River during the last 200 years, which means that the East China Sea shelf and Yangtze River dominated the provenance of the Late Quaternary sediments in the southern Okinawa Trough.