Recent morphological changes in the Mekong and Bassac river channels, Mekong delta: The marked impact of river-bed mining and implications for delta destabilisation

• The deltaic Mekong and Bassac channels show important deepening between 1998 and 2008.
• Channel deepening has been associated with massive bed material losses.
• These changes are attributed to large-scale river-bed sand mining.
• River-bed mining and hydropower dams will significantly destabilise the delta.

The Mekong delta, in Vietnam, is the world's third largest delta. Densely populated, the delta has been significantly armoured with engineering works and dykes to protect populations and infrastructure from storms, and shrimp farms from saltwater intrusion. Considerable development pressures in Vietnam and in the upstream countries have resulted in the construction of several dams in China and in important channel-bed aggregate extractions especially in Cambodia. The effects of these developments impact the delta dynamics in various ways. In this study, changes in the channel morphology of the Mekong proper and the Bassac, the two main distributaries in the 250 km-long deltaic reach from the Cambodian border to the coast, were analysed using channel depth data for 1998 and 2008. The channels display important and irregular bed changes over the 10-year comparison period, including significant incision and expansion and deepening of numerous pools. The mean depth of both channels increased by more than 1.3 m. Both channels also showed correlative significant bed material losses: respectively 90 million m3 in the Mekong and 110 million m3 in the Bassac over the 10-year period. These important losses over a relatively short period, and weak correlations between bed incision and hydraulic parameters suggest that the marked morphological changes are not in equilibrium with flow and sediment entrainment conditions, and are therefore not related to changes in river hydrology. We claim that aggregate extraction, currently practised on a very large scale in the Mekong delta channels and upstream of the delta, is the main cause of these recent morphological changes. These changes are deemed to contribute actively to rampant bank erosion in the delta as well as to erosion of the Mekong delta shoreline. Other contributory activities include the numerous dykes and embankments. The role of existing dams in bed losses remains unclear in the absence of reliable data on the Mekong sediment load. Future large-scale hydropower dam development on the Lower Mekong main stem will have cumulative effects with aggregate extraction, leading to increased morphological changes that will further impact the delta, especially in terms of sediment supply and coastal erosion.