ArticleScience advances2024
Evolution of groundwater system in the Pearl River Delta and its adjacent shelf since the late Pleistocene.
Article in Science advances, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- The saline groundwater legacy of a large buried coastal paleo-estuary.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Paleo-salt water dominates coastal aquifer salinization: A continental-scale study in China.Science advances · 2026Article
- Multimillennial climate-freshwater legacy beneath a large-river delta-front estuary.Science advances · 2026Article
- Microbes Under Climate Refugia: Equable Subcommunity Rank Dynamics in Large-River Deltaic Estuaries.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Our extensive field studies demonstrate that saline groundwater inland and freshened groundwater offshore coexist in the same aquifer system in the Pearl River delta and its adjacent shelf. This counterintuitive phenomenon challenges the commonly held assumption that onshore groundwater is typically fresh, while offshore groundwater is saline. To address this knowledge gap, we conduct a series of sophisticated paleo-hydrogeological models to explore the formation mechanism and evolution process of the groundwater system in the inland-shelf systems. Our findings indicate that shelf freshened groundwater has formed during the lowstands since late Pleistocene, while onshore saline groundwater is generated by paleo-seawater intrusion during the Holocene transgression. This reveals that terrestrial and offshore groundwater systems have undergone alternating changes on a geological timescale. The groundwater system exhibits hysteresis responding to paleoclimate changes, with a lag of 7 to 8 thousand years, suggesting that paleoclimatic forcings exert a significantly residual influence on the present-day groundwater system.
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Registered trials
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