Wind, Water & Ice: How Erosion Interacts with Climate and Tectonics to Shape the Landscape

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As tectonic plates collide to build mountains, environmental agents like rivers, glaciers and wind tear them back down. This interplay of climate and tectonics is remarkably balanced, resulting in landscapes that are stable - at least that is until they are poked and prodded by tectonic or climatic perturbations, resulting in brief, unstable excursions or the establishment of new stable forms. Unravelling the relative impact of climate and tectonics on the landscape has proven elusive despite decades of study. However, given the increasing availability of high-resolution climate, vegetation and topographic datasets, a growing database of rock, uplift, and erosion data, and high-powered computers capable of analyzing and modeling these data, we are now poised for a breakthrough in our understanding of climate-tectonic interactions and landscape evolution, with impacts for our understanding of geologic hazards and how the landscape will respond to future climate change. Research funded by this Discovery Grant will address the following objectives. (1) My research team and I will develop a comprehensive toolkit for reading tectonic uplift rate from the shape of features of the landscape (e.g., the sharpness of the front of a mountain range, the depth of river basins along that range, the shape of rivers in profile and map view), testing our methods in the Andes and Canadian Rockies. (2) We will develop a statistical model to evaluate the relative impact of climate and tectonics on the landscape, starting with applications in Argentina and the Himalaya. This model will address the challenges of comparing datasets that have different spatial resolution or coverage, and explicitly consider the temporal and spatial scale of datasets. Finally, (3) we will examine the contrasting impact of glaciers in shaping the Himalaya and wind erosion in sculpting the Puna Plateau in Argentina. Because glaciers are restricted to high altitude or latitude and wind erosion is limited to arid regions with particular atmospheric conditions, their unique footprints can be leveraged to assess the influence of climate on mountain range evolution. Our work will develop tools that can be used by other researchers to understand landscape evolution anywhere on Earth or even on other planets. It will help us understand how rivers and glaciers respond to tectonic and climatic perturbations, which in turn will constrain the impacts of modern climate change in Canada and beyond. Finally, it will support the training of at least 5 graduate students and 20 undergraduate students in an equitable, diverse, and inclusive environment. Students will gain skills highly relevant to the modern economy, including training in geographic information systems (GIS), numerical and statistical modeling, digital illustration, data analysis, and oral and written communication.