Isolating climatic, tectonic, and lithologic controls on mountain landscape evolution.

ABSTRACT: Establishing that climate exerts an important general influence on topography in tectonically active settings has proven an elusive goal. Here, we show that climates ranging from arid to humid consistently influence fluvial erosional efficiency and thus topography, and this effect is captured by a simple metric that combines channel steepness and mean annual rainfall, k_snQ. Accounting for spatial rainfall variability additionally increases the sensitivity of channel steepness to lithologic and tectonic controls on topography, enhancing predictions of erosion and rock uplift rates, and supports the common assumption of a reference concavity near 0.5. In contrast, the standard channel steepness metric, k_sn, intrinsically assumes that climate is uniform. Co

SUBMITTER: Leonard JS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9858509 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature