Jonathan A. Warrick 2014 <p>The Eel River coastal margin has been used as a representative source-to-sink sediment dispersal system owing to its steep, high-sediment yield river and the formation of sedimentary strata on its continental shelf. One finding of previous studies is that the adjacent continental shelf retains only ~25% of the Eel River fine-grained sediment (less than 63 &mu;m) discharged over time scales of both individual floods and the 20th century, thus suggesting that the Eel shelf trapping-efficiency is uniquely lower than other similar systems. Here I provide data and analyses showing that sediment discharge relationships in the Eel River have varied strongly with time and include substantial decreases in suspended-sediment concentrations during the latter 20th century. Including these trends in margin-wide sediment budgets, I show that previous Eel River sediment discharge rates were overestimated by a factor of two. Thus, revised sediment budgets shown here reveal that the Eel shelf retained ~50% of the discharged river fine-grained suspended sediment during intensively sampled events of 1995&ndash;97 and over the 20th century. In light of this, hypotheses about high rates of sediment export away from the primary shelf depocenter should be reevaluated.</p> application/pdf 10.1016/j.margeo.2014.03.008 en Elsevier Scientific Pub. Co. Eel River margin source-to-sink sediment budgets: revisited article