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Full-Text Articles in Geology
Climate Change And Late Pliocene Acceleration Of Erosion In The Himalaya, Katharine Huntington, Ann Blythe, Kip Hodges
Climate Change And Late Pliocene Acceleration Of Erosion In The Himalaya, Katharine Huntington, Ann Blythe, Kip Hodges
Ann Blythe
Studies of active mountain ranges suggest that atmospheric and geodynamic processes may be strongly coupled through erosion — a hypothesis that has led to a debate over the relative importance of climate and far-field tectonic forcing in influencing erosion. We addressed this debate by developing the detailed long-term erosional history of a transect in the central Annapurna Range of Nepal for comparison with the climate and tectonic forcing histories of the region. Patterns of apatite fission-track and muscovite 40Ar/39Ar apparent ages with elevation indicate a five-fold increase in apparent erosion rate between 2.5 and 0.9 Ma ago. The time frame …
Climatic Forcing Of Erosion, Landscape, And Tectonics In The Bhutan Himalayas, Djordje Grujic, Isabelle Coutand, Bodo Bookhagen, Stéphane Bonnet, Ann Blythe, Chris Duncan
Climatic Forcing Of Erosion, Landscape, And Tectonics In The Bhutan Himalayas, Djordje Grujic, Isabelle Coutand, Bodo Bookhagen, Stéphane Bonnet, Ann Blythe, Chris Duncan
Ann Blythe
A fundamental objective in studies of climate-erosion-tectonics coupling is to document convincing correlation between observable indicators of these processes on the scale of a mountain range. The eastern Himalayas are a unique range to quantify the contribution of tectonics and climate to long-term erosion rates, because uniform and steady tectonics have persisted for several million years, while monsoonal precipitation patterns have varied in space and time. Specifically, the rise of the Shillong plateau, the only orographic barrier in the Himalayan foreland, has reduced the mean annual precipitation downwind in the eastern Bhutan Himalaya at the Miocene-Pliocene transition. Apatite fission-track (AFT) …