The Yellow River has not always ended here. Sediment carried from west to east has built three separate deltas along this coast. The ancient one is the sum of every shift the river made before it broke through at Tongwaxiang in 1855 and took the northern course to the sea; the middle one is the modern-era delta that the new course built. The third began in 1934, when the point where the river divided into its last two channels moved 26 kilometres seaward. That is the delta people mean today: a fan opening eastwards, all of it below 15 metres, about 5,450 square kilometres in area, running from the Tao'er estuary in the north to the Zimao estuary in the south.
From the journal
Where the River Builds New Land
The Yellow River ends in a fan of wet ground that is still being built, and the reserve set aside inside it has to share its borders with an oilfield.
In the same city · Dongying ↗Three deltas on one coastline
A billion tonnes of silt a year
The river carries 1.049 billion tonnes of sediment to the ocean every year, the highest load of any river on earth, at an average concentration of 25.5 kilograms per cubic metre. That mass is why the delta keeps moving. Land grows by 3,240 hectares a year and the whole fan lengthens by about 2.2 kilometres a year, so the average coastline advances roughly 390 metres annually, and the ground is called the youngest land in China. The river's own work here is restless. Since 1855 the mouth has shifted fifty times, reaching its present position in 1976, the same year the Diaokou River was cut off from the main channel on the northern edge.
153,000 hectares set aside
A municipal reserve was created in December 1990, became provincial in November 1991, and was approved by the State Council as the Shandong Yellow River Delta National Nature Reserve in October 1992. It covers 153,000 hectares and 131 kilometres of coast, divided into a strictly protected core, a buffer where farming and fishing continue, and an experimental zone. Its borders were drawn to overlap as little as possible with the oilfield's facilities. Inside are 32,772 hectares of reed marsh, 38,534 of intertidal mudflat and 31,314 of marine water. It is the world's most important breeding ground for Oriental white storks, and 2,200 stork chicks have hatched inside it since 2003, against a world population of roughly 3,000.