GLObal Suspended Sediment (GLOSS): Drivers, trends and future trajectories

This project addresses how environmental change affects the movement of sediment through rivers and into our oceans. Understanding the movement of suspended sediment is important because it is a vector for nutrients and pollutants, and because sediment also creates floodplains and nourishes deltas and beaches, affording resilience to coastal zones. To develop our understanding of sediment flows, we will quantify recent variations (1985-present) in sediment loads for every river on the planet with a width greater than 90 metres. We will also project how these river sediment loads will change into the future.

These goals have not previously been possible to achieve because direct measurements of sediment transport through rivers have only ever been made on very few (