Data for "Flocculated Silt, Not Clay, Dominates River Suspended Sediment Load"

This dataset accompanies the paper Nghiem et al. (2026), Flocculated Silt, Not Clay, Dominates River Suspended Sediment Load, and contains XRD sediment mineralogy data for river suspended sediment. We measured XRD patterns of sediment from the Wax Lake Delta using a Malvern Panalytical Empyrean powder diffractometer and performed Rietveld refinement to compute mineral mass fractions in the HighScore Plus software. We measured fully dispersed grain size distributions of Wax Lake Delta sediment using a Malvern Mastersizer 3000E laser diffraction particle size analyzer. Please refer to the paper for a full description of the methods and calculations.readme: Description of variables in the data filesWLD_XRD_pattern: XRD patterns of Wax Lake Delta sediment samplesWLD_XRD_sample: XRD mineral mass fractions of Wax Lake Delta sediment samplesXRD_claymineral_datacompilation: Data compilation of XRD-measured clay mineral fractions in known grain size ranges of river suspended sediment. Grain sizes and clay mineral fractions were corrected to reflect converting the originally reported grain diameters to the diameter of a sphere with the same volume as the grain (as defined in laser diffraction grain size analysis).The Wax Lake Delta sediment samples were collected as part of the NASA Delta-X project. Grain size distributions and sampling times and locations are reported in [https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/2379] for bed and suspended sediment and [https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/2382] for core sediment.