Chinese Offshore Investigation and Assessment Project, No.908-01-ST09; State Student Innovation Training Project, No.SIT-05; Program for New Century Excellent Talents, No.NCET-06-0446; National Natural Science Foundation of China, No.J0630535 Acknowledgement The research vessel Experiment 2 (South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences) performed the field survey and Prof. Lizhe Cai and his colleagues help to collect the sediment samples. Prof. Shu Gao and Asso. Prof. Yongzhan Zhang have provided a lot of support and valuable suggestions for this study. Miss Xiaoqin Du helped with sediment transportation and Mr. Fengyang Min assisted in the operation of related software. The comments from Dr. M. Xia (Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, NOAA, USA) have improved a lot in the presentation of the paper.
There are 71 surface sediment samples collected from the eastern Beibu Gulf. The moment parameters (i.e. mean size, sorting and skewness) were obtained after applying grain size analysis. The geostatistical analysis...