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Water And Sediment Discharge From Small Mountainous Rivers, Taiwan: The Roles Of Lithology, Episodic Events, And Human Activities, S. J. Kao, John D. Milliman

VIMS Articles

Taiwan’s natural setting creates highly vulnerable watersheds whose rivers discharge disproportionately large quantities of sediment to the coastal ocean. The 16 Taiwanese rivers analyzed in this article discharge ∼180 Mt yr^-1 of sediment to the coastal ocean, although totals over the past 20 years have varied between 16 and 440 Mt yr^-1. The mean annual sediment yield of 9500 t km^-2 yr^-1 for the 16 rivers is 60-fold greater than the global yield of 150 t km^-2 yr^-1, but mean yields for the individual rivers vary by more than 2 orders of …