Geochemical characteristics and genesis of detrital apatites from the surrounding rivers into the Bohai Sea

To trace where the detrital deposits of the Bohai Sea come from is important for better understanding the basin-mountain coupling and the formation of the Yellow River, in addition to the distribution of the detrital sediments around the Bohai Sea. In this paper, the laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) is applied to analyze the composition of trace elements of the detrital apatite grains from the main rivers pouring into Liaodong Bay, Bohai Bay, and Laizhou Bay, combining with Kolmogorov-Smirnov multi-dimensional discrimination diagram (MDS) and Back Propagation(BP) neural network to perform sediment provenance discrimination. Results show that they are all characterized by high Sr, Y and light rare earth elements(LREE). However, there are some differences in the sediments from different rivers, which may be related to the source rocks of apatite.