LAUSR

Abstract Located on the northwestern margin of the South China Sea, the origin of asymmetrical shelf-slope clinoforms accumulated on the continental margin of the Qiongdongnan Basin since the late Miocene is ambiguous and it likely is the first case of oblique sediment transport and dispersal among the most studied mud-rich shelves of the world during Neogene to Recent sea-level changes. We calculate the paleo-sediment flux required to build the shelf-slope clinoforms based on 2-D seismic data, and the results are 3 to 17 time larger than the estimated paleo-sediment discharge from the proximal catchment area of Hainan Island. This large mismatch suggests that sediments on the shelf-edge of Qiongdongnan Basin were not only from Hainan Island but more likely from a larger drainage system. The strong (tens km) southward migration of the western portion of the Qiongdongnan shelf-edge break compared to the weak (1–2 km) shelf-edge progradation in the eastern portion, suggests that the Qiongdongnan shelf prism is highly asymmetric and is caused by a large sediment supply centered to the west, with most likely the Red River (Song Hong) as the sediment supply driver. The fine-grained lithology of the studied shelf margin sediments off Hainan Island, especially since the end Miocene, suggests that they were derived mainly from the Red River and were transported southeastward from the Gulf of Tonkin by shelf currents. We propose a model for asymmetric shelf-slope accretion of mud-rich shelves in which a significant part of the sediment-prism volume was obliquely dispersed across the subsiding shelf as fluid mud during highstand sea-levels. The model presented here describes oblique construction of shelf-slope clinoforms in a mud-rich system in response to variations in sediment dispersal and depocenter during multiple sea-level cycles. This model of long-term (~107 years), lateral asymmetric accretion contrasts with oblique sediment transport in other source-to-sink sedimentary systems around the world.