TY - JOUR

T1 - Sand mining in the Mekong Delta revisited - current scales of local sediment deficits

AU - Jordan, Christian

AU - Tiede, Jan

AU - Lojek, Oliver

AU - Visscher, Jan

AU - Apel, Heiko

AU - Nguyen, Hong Quan

AU - Quang, Chau Nguyen Xuan

AU - Schlurmann, Torsten

N1 - Funding Information: This study was performed as part of the research project Catch-Mekong (https://catchmekong.eoc.dlr.de/). Funding was provided by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) (FKZ: 02WM1338D) and by the Vietnamese Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) (Research project: KHCN-TNB.DT/14-19/C11). We would like to thank all students who participated in the field studies. Special thanks goes to the team of the hydrological station of My Thuan (Vietnam) for their support during both field surveys. Furthermore, we appreciate the provision of hydrological data by the SRHMC and sand extraction volumes by the responsible DONREs, the SMCD and the MONRE. We are also thankful for detailed data about net sediment losses within the study area for the period from 1998 to 2008, provided by Guillaume Brunier, University of La Rochelle, France.

PY - 2019/11/28

Y1 - 2019/11/28

N2 - The delta of the Mekong River in Vietnam has been heavily impacted by anthropogenic stresses in recent years, such as upstream dam construction and sand mining within the main and distributary channels, leading to riverbank and coastal erosion. Intensive bathymetric surveys, conducted within the Tien River branch during the dry and wet season 2018, reveal a high magnitude of sand mining activities. For the year 2018, an analysis of bathymetric maps and the local refilling processes leads to an estimated sand extraction volume of 4.64 ± 0.31 Mm 3/yr in the study area, which covered around 20 km. Reported statistics of sand mining for all of the Mekong’s channels within the delta, which have a cumulative length of several hundred kilometres, are 17.77 Mm 3/yr for this period. Results from this study highlight that these statistics are likely too conservative. It is also shown that natural sediment supplies from upper reaches of the Mekong are insufficient to compensate for the loss of extracted bed aggregates, illustrating the non-sustainable nature of the local sand mining practices.

AB - The delta of the Mekong River in Vietnam has been heavily impacted by anthropogenic stresses in recent years, such as upstream dam construction and sand mining within the main and distributary channels, leading to riverbank and coastal erosion. Intensive bathymetric surveys, conducted within the Tien River branch during the dry and wet season 2018, reveal a high magnitude of sand mining activities. For the year 2018, an analysis of bathymetric maps and the local refilling processes leads to an estimated sand extraction volume of 4.64 ± 0.31 Mm 3/yr in the study area, which covered around 20 km. Reported statistics of sand mining for all of the Mekong’s channels within the delta, which have a cumulative length of several hundred kilometres, are 17.77 Mm 3/yr for this period. Results from this study highlight that these statistics are likely too conservative. It is also shown that natural sediment supplies from upper reaches of the Mekong are insufficient to compensate for the loss of extracted bed aggregates, illustrating the non-sustainable nature of the local sand mining practices.

KW - article

KW - mining

KW - sediment

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85075723790&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1038/s41598-019-53804-z

DO - 10.1038/s41598-019-53804-z

M3 - Article

C2 - 31780684

VL - 9

JO - Scientific reports

JF - Scientific reports

SN - 2045-2322

IS - 1

M1 - 17823

ER -