Category: Geomorphology

Did the Meteor Crater impact in Arizona dam the Grand Canyon 56 thousand years ago?

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Meteor Crater, Arizona, USA. Credit: Travel in USA

Meteor Crater, 60 km east of Flagstaff in Arizona, USA, is probably the most visited site of an impact by an extraterrestrial object. At 1.3 km across it isn’t especially big, but it is exceptionally well preserved, having formed a mere 55.6 ka ago. Apart from its shape its impact origin is proved by its rim, which shows overturning and inversion of strata that it penetrated. The 40 metre  diameter nickel-iron object that did the damage arrived at a speed around 13 km s-1 and delivered kinetic energy equivalent to an explosion of 10 million tons of TNT. This was sufficient to vaporise the body, except for a few fragments. Impressive as that is, the impact was tiny compared with others known on Earth, such as the Chicxulub impact that ended the Mesozoic Era 60 Ma ago. Nevertheless, the surface blast would have sterilised an area up to 1000 km2 around the impact, i.e. up to 17 km in all directions. Yet, most of the impact energy would have affected the surrounding crust. It’s a place worth visiting.

The other must-see site in northern Arizona is the Grand Canyon, some 100 km north of Flagstaff by train, and about 320 km by road. Unlike Meteor Crater, whose origins were well established  more than 50 years ago, the Grand Canyon still draws research teams to study the geology of the rock formations through which it cuts and the geomorphological processes that formed it. Several expeditions have examined caves high above the level of the Colorado River that has cut the Canyon since the start of the Pliocene Epoch, some 5 Ma ago. One objective of this research has been to document past flooding, due to the massive landslides and rock falls that must have occurred as cliffs became unstable during canyon formation. One cave – Stanton’s Cave – is 45 m above the present level of the Colorado: about the height of a 16 storey block of flats. The cave floor is made of well-bedded sand that contains driftwood logs, as do other caves along the canyon. Dating the logs from cave to cave should give at least an idea of the history of flooding and thus cliff collapses. In the case of Stanton’s Cave early radiocarbon dating yielded results close to the maximum that the rapid decay of 14C makes possible. Such dating at the limit of the technique is imprecise. The oldest existing radiocarbon age in this case is 43.5 ± 1.5 ka from a 1984 study. Since then, this dating technique has advanced considerably.

Fig Remnants of a landslide, subsequently breached, in the Grand Canyon downstream of Stanton’s Cave. Credit: Richard Hereford

Karl Karlstrom – whose father was also entranced by cave deposits in the Grand Canyon in the 1960s – together with colleagues from the US managed to persuade radiocarbon specialists from Australia and New Zealand to improve the sediment dating (Karlstrom, K.E and 11 others 2025. Grand Canyon landslide-dam and paleolake triggered by the Meteor Crater impact at 56 ka. Geology, v. 53, online article; DOI: 10.1130/G53571.1). The new 14Cage of the logs is  55.25 ± 2.44 ka, confirmed by infrared stimulated luminescence (IRSL) dating of feldspar grains in the cave sand at  56.00 ± 6.39 ka  Combined with a new cosmogenic nuclide exposure age of 56.00 ± 2.40 ka  for the Meteor Crater ejecta the results are exciting. It looks as if the cliff fall that dammed the Colorado River to fill the cave with sediment coincided with the impact. Crater formation is estimated to have resulted in a seismic event of magnitude 5.4. In such a teetering terrain as the Grand Canyon cliffs, the impact-induced earthquake about 100 km away, even if attenuated to an effective magnitude estimated at 3.5  may have been sufficient to topple part of the cliffs. With cliffs that average 1.6 km high, such a collapse would have displaced sufficient debris to create a substantial barrier to flow of the Colorado River, which is tightly constrained between cliffs. The chaotic debris at the suggested dam site is now partly covered by round river cobbles, suggesting that it was soon overtopped, probably within a thousand years of the cliff collapse.

Because all the dates have substantial imprecision, it is not possible to claim that the authors have proved conclusively a direct connection between impact and cliff collapse. But neither do the age data disprove what is a plausible causal connection.

See also: UNM study finds link between Grand Canyon landslide and Meteor Crater impact. University of New Mexico News 15 July 2025

Wildfires and the formation of sugar-loaf hills

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One iconic feature of Rio de Janeiro is Corcovado Mountain, topped by the huge Cristo Redentor (Christ the Redeemer) statue. Another is the Sugar Loaf (Pão de Açúcar) that broods over Botafogo Bay. Each is an inselberg: a loan word from the German for ‘island mountain’. Elsewhere they are known as kopjes (southern Africa), monadnocks (North America) or bornhardts after the German explorer who first described them. But, being on the coast, the Brazilian examples are not typical. Most rise up spectacularly from almost featureless plains, a well-known case being Uluru (Ayers Rock) almost at the centre of Australia. Arid and semi-arid plains of Africa and the Indian subcontinent are liberally dotted with them. So scenically dominant and spectacularly stark, inselbergs are often revered by local people, and have been so for millennia. The only thing that I remember from a desperately boring, but compulsory, first-year course on geomorphology in 1965 is their connection with the ‘cosmogonic egg’: a mythological motif that spans Eurasia, Australia and Africa, signifying that from which the universe hatched. It is perhaps no coincidence that hills in England that suddenly rise from flat land, such as the Wrekin in Shropshire and Malvern Hill in Worcestershire, still host the sport of rolling hard-boiled eggs to celebrate the pagan festival of Eostre (now Easter) that marks the spring rebirth of the land.    

Vista of Rio de Janeiro and its inselbergs (Credit: Leonardo Ferreira Mendes, Creative Commons)

How inselbergs and their surrounding plains formed has long been a hot topic in tropical geomorphology. One theory is that they are especially resistant rocks around which eroding rivers meandered during the formation of peneplains, a variant being that they were surrounded by lines of weakness, such as faults or major joint systems. Another is that they formed by erosion into a deeply but irregularly weathered surface. Then there is L.C. Kings theory of escarpment retreat and, of course, a mixture of processes in different stages, or a unique origin for each inselberg. In effect, there has been no final, widely agreed explanation. But that that may be about to change.

A common element to most inselbergs is their very steep and sometimes vertical flanks. Some even display overhangs at their base. Such potential shelters encouraged local people to camp there and, in response to the awe inspired by the sheer majesty of the looming inselberg, to use them for sacred rites and decoration. That is especially true of Australia, so it is fitting that what may be a breakthrough in understanding inselberg formation should have arisen there. (Buckman, S. et al. 2021. Fire-induced rock spalling as a mechanism of weathering responsible for flared slope and inselberg development. Nature Communications, v. 12, article 2150; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22451-2). Breaking rock by deliberate use of fire has been done for millennia. For instance, Hannibal is said to have used fire to break down huge fallen boulders that blocked passage for his war elephants as his army advanced on Rome. Fire setting is still used by villagers in South India to spall large flakes of rock from outcrops. It is done with such skill that thin slabs up to 3-4 metres across can be lifted, and then split into thin posts for fencing or training vines: an essential alternative to wooden posts that termites would otherwise devour in a matter of months.

Solomon Buckman and colleagues from the University of Wollongong, Australia were drawn to a new hypothesis for inselberg formation by observations around low rock faces and boulders after the 2019-20 “Black Summer” wildfires in eastern Australia. Where burned trees had fallen against rock faces up to hundreds of kg of spalled flakes lay at the base of each face, which also bore freshly formed scars: clear signs of fire action. Thermal expansion and contraction of rock caused by air temperatures of hundreds of degrees close to wildfires is clearly a powerful means of rapid erosion. If the rock is damp – most likely at the base of a rockface as all rainfall on the outcrop drains in its direction – the mechanism is enhanced: Hannibal’s engineers poured vinegar onto the boulders heated by fire, to great effect. Buckman et al. estimate the rate of lateral erosion by fire at slope bases in Australia to be around ten thousand times faster than those operating on horizontal rock surfaces, which are not exposed to fire as no vegetation grows on them. Over time, slopes steepen aided by the formation of flared surfaces at the base. If spalled debris is carried away quickly the developing inselberg evolves to its classical sugarloaf shape. In more arid conditions the debris builds around the outcrop to steadily smother inselberg development, leaving tors and kopjes. The paper came to press remarkably quickly relative to the authors’ field work and analyses. This is a work-in-progress to be followed up by cosmogenic-isotope and other means of surface dating of the tops and flanks of suitably accessible inselbergs and simiar features such as Western Australia’s famous Wave Rock (a flared escarpment).

Wave Rock in the interior of Western Australia is 15 m high and 100 m long and revered by the local Ballardong people as a creation of the Rainbow Serpent

What controls the height of mountains?

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‘Everybody knows’ that mountains grow: the question is, ‘How?’ There is a tale that farmers once believed that they grew from pebbles: ‘every year I try to rid my field of stones, but more are back the following year, so they must grow’… Geoscientists know better – or so they think[!] – and for 130 years have referred to ‘orogeny’, a classically-inspired term (from the Ancient Greek óros and geneia – high-ground creation’) adopted by the US geologist Grove Gilbert. It incorporates the concept of crustal thickening that results from lateral forces and horizontal compression. Another term, now rarely used, is ‘epeirogeny’ (coined too by G.K. Gilbert), wherein the continental surface rises or falls in response to underlying gravitational forces. That could include: changing mantle density over a hot, rising plume; detachment or delamination into the mantle of dense lower lithosphere; loading or unloading by ice during glacial cycles. Epeirogeny is bound up with isostasy, the maintenance of gravitational balance of mass in the outermost Earth.

A small part of the High Himalaya (credit: Access-Himalaya)

In 1990, Peter Molnar and Philip England pointed out that the incision of deep valleys into mountain ranges results in stupendous and rapid removal of mass from orogenic belts, which adds a major isostatic force to mountain building (Molnar, P. & England, P. 1990. Late Cenozoic uplift of mountain ranges and global climate change: chicken or egg? Nature, v. 346, p. 29–34; DOI: 10.1038/346029a0). In their model, the remaining peaks are driven higher by isostasy. They, and others, coupled climate change with compressional tectonics in a positive feedback that drives peaks to elevations that they would otherwise never achieve. Molnar and England’s review saw complex interplays contributing to mountain building, accompanying chemical weathering even changing global climate by sequestering atmospheric CO2 into the minerals that it produces. As well as the height of peaks in active zones of crustal shortening and thickening, such as the Himalaya, Molnar and England’s theory explained the aberrant high peaks at the edge of high plateaus that are passively subject to erosion. Examples of the latter are the isolated peaks beyond the eastern edge of the Ethiopian Plateau that locally have the greatest elevation than the flood basalts that form the plateau: unloading around these peaks has caused them to rise isostatically.

Thirty years on, this paradigm is being questioned, at least as regards active orogens (Dielforder, A. et al. 2020. Megathrust shear force controls mountain height at convergent plate margins. Nature, v. 582, p. 225–229; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2340-7). Armin Dielforder and colleagues at the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam and The University of Münster consider that overall mountain height is sustained by interactions between three forces. 1. They are prevented from falling apart under their own weight or being pushed up further against gravity by lateral tectonic force. 2. Climate controlled erosion limits mountain height by removing material from the highest elevations. 3. Isostasy keeps the mountains ‘afloat’ above the asthenosphere. The authors have attempted to assess and balance all three major forces that determine the overall elevation of mountain belts.

At a convergent plate margin where one plate is shoved beneath another, the megathrust above the subduction zone behaves in a brittle fashion, with associated friction, towards the surface. At depth this transitions to a zone of ductile deformation dominated by viscosity. A major assumption in this work is that stress in the crust below a mountain belt is neutral; i.e. horizontal, tectonic compression is equal to the weight of the mountains themselves and thus to their height. So, the greater the tectonic compressive force the higher the mountain range that it can support. The test is to compare the actual elevation with that predicted from plate-tectonic considerations. For 10 active orogenic belts there is a remarkable correspondence between the model and actuality. the authors conclude that variation over time of mountain height reflects log-term variations in the force balance, in which they find little sign of a climatic/erosional control. But that doesn’t resolve the issue satisfactorily, at least for me.

The study focuses on the mean elevation, and this leaves out the largest mountains; for instance, their maximum mean elevation for the Himalaya is about 5.46 km (in fact for a narrow  NE-SW swath that may not be representative of the whole range). Yet the Himalaya contains 10 of the world’s highest mountains, all over 8 km high and 50 peaks that top 7 km, adjacent to the Tibetan Plateau. The mean elevation of the whole Himalayan range is 6.1 km. Consequently, it seems to me, the range’s maximum mean elevation must be somewhat higher than that reported by Dielforder et al.  The difference suggests that non-tectonic forces do contribute significantly to Himalayan terrain

See also:  Wang, K. 2020. Mountain height may be controlled by tectonic force, rather than erosion. Nature, v. 582, p. 189-190; DOI: 10.1038/d41586-020-01601-4

The effect of surface processes on tectonics

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Active sedimentation in the Indus and Upper Ganges plains (green vegetated) derived from rapid erosion of the Himalaya (credit: Google Earth)

The Proterozoic Eon of the Precambrian is subdivided into the Palaeo-, Meso- and Neoproterozoic Eras that are, respectively, 900, 600 and 450 Ma long. The degree to which geoscientists are sufficiently interested in rocks within such time spans is roughly proportional to the number of publications whose title includes their name. Searching the ISI Web of Knowledge using this parameter yields 2000, 840 and 2700 hits in the last two complete decades, that is 2.2, 1.4 and 6.0 hits per million years, respectively. Clearly there is less interest in the early part of the Proterozoic. Perhaps that is due to there being smaller areas over which they are exposed, or maybe simply because what those rocks show is inherently less interesting than those of the Neoproterozoic. The Neoproterozoic is stuffed with fascinating topics: the appearance of large-bodied life forms; three Snowball Earth episodes; and a great deal of tectonic activity, including the Pan-African orogeny. The time that precedes it isn’t so gripping: it is widely known as the ‘boring billion’ – coined by the late Martin Brazier – from about 1.75 to 0.75 Ga. The Palaeoproterozoic draws attention by encompassing the ‘Great Oxygenation Event’ around 2.4 Ga, the massive deposition of banded iron formations up to 1.8 Ga, its own Snowball Earth, emergence of the eukaryotes and several orogenies. The Mesoproterozoic witnesses one orogeny, the formation of a supercontinent (Rodinia) and even has its own petroleum potential (93 billion barrels in place in Australia’s Beetaloo Basin. So it does have its high points, but not a lot. Although data are more scanty than for the Phanerozoic Eon, during the Mesoproterozoic the Earth’s magnetic field was much steadier than in later times. That suggests that motions in the core were in a ‘steady state’, and possibly in the mantle as well. The latter is borne out by the lower pace of tectonics in the Mesoproterozoic. Continue reading “The effect of surface processes on tectonics” →

Evolution of the River Nile

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The longest river in the world, the Nile has all sorts of riveting connotations in terms of archaeology, Africa’s colonial history, the romance of early exploration and is currently the focus of disputes about rights to its waters. The last stems from its vast potential for irrigation and for hydropower. It is probably the most complex of all the major rivers of our planet because it stretches across so many climatic zones, topographic systems geological and tectonic provinces. Mohamed Abdelsalam of Oklahoma State University, who was born in the Sudan and began his career at the confluence of the White and Blue Nile in its capital Khartoum, is an ideal person to produce a modern scientific summary of how the Nile has evolved. That is because he has studied some of the key elements of the geology through which the river and its major tributaries travel, but most of all because he is a leading geological and geomorphological interpreter of remotely sensed data. Only space imagery can let us grasp the immense span and complexity of the Nile system. His recent review of its entirety (Abdelsalam, M.G. 2018. The Nile’s journey through space and time: A geological perspective. Earth Science Reviews, v. 177, p. 742-773; doi: 10.1016/j.earscirev.2018.01.010) is a tour de force, many years in the compilation, and it makes fittingly compulsive reading.

Abdelsalam lays out the geomorphology, underlying geology and regional tectonics of the Nile drainage basin, synthesized from publications over the last century, including his own work on the evolution of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia. On the regional scale elements of its complexity can be ascribed to the upwelling of mantle plumes beneath the Ethiopian Highlands and Red Sea, and under the Lake Plateau centred on Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi. These plumes are part of a much larger mantle mass rising from the core-mantle boundary beneath the African continent. Their influence on the lithosphere of north-east Africa began over 30 million years ago, producing vast outpourings of flood basalts followed by regional doming, the formation of large shield volcanoes and rifting to transform a once muted surface to one with a topographic range of up to 5 kilometres in the Nile’s two main source regions in Ethiopia and the Lakes Plateau.

Nile geology F5
The geological underpinnings of the Nile system (Credit: Abdelsalam 2018; Fig. 5)

The basin can be divided into six distinct provinces, from south to north the Lakes, Sudd, Central Sudan, Ethiopia – East Sudan, Cataract and Egyptian Niles. Each of them has had a different history; in fact, the making of the Nile system as we know it has taken at least 6 million years and probably longer. For instance, the Lakes Nile basin, founded mostly on Precambrian crystalline basement, seems original to have drained westward through the Congo system to the Atlantic Ocean. Sometime between 20 and 12 Ma the western branch of the East African Rift System began to form along with slow, broad uplift, hindering westward flow to create the forerunners of the Great Lakes. The flow was reversed around 2.5 Ma ago by the rise of the Rwenzori and Virunga massifs on the western rift flank and eventually forced northwards into the low-lying Sudd, breaching a major divide in Northern Uganda. The vast swamps there have acted as a buffer for sediment supply, other than the finest silts and clays, into the northern stretches of the White Nile. The Blue Nile’s tortuous trajectory evolved as the Ethiopian flood basalt province rose after 30 Ma, rifted to form the Lake Tana Basin and drained to initiate erosion into the rising plateau with the interference of huge shield volcanoes that formed as uplift proceeded.

Other events are recorded along the Nile’ general trajectory by huge, abandoned alluvial fans, relics of now vanished lakes and evidence from satellite radar of palaeo-drainages with reversed flow beneath the surface of the eastern Sahara. The system evolved episodically, in five or more steps, at the whim of broad tectonic processes that affected flow direction and erosive capacity. The Cataract Nile that cuts through hard basement rocks perhaps records the increase in energy added by the Blue Nile which, which in turn may have encouraged the drainage of the huge Sudd swamps that established the White Nile’s course. Even the Mediterranean Sea played a role: the Egyptian Nile may have formed when the sea vanished to expose a deep saline basin during the Messinian Salinity Crisis 5.5 Ma ago. This reduction in the regional base level of erosion possibly directed drainage into the present course of the Nile. The various provinces only became a unified drainage system during the last half million years, and that emerged in its present form as recently as 15 thousand years ago.  But as Abdelsalam points out, there is a great deal to learn about the fabled river system. Hopefully his review will encourage others to take investigations forward and into previously unstudied regions.

Fish influence mountain ranges

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When asked if he would like water in his whisky W.C Fields famously remarked that he didn’t drink water because fish procreate in it (his actual words were somewhat racier). Migratory salmon do so in their millions with a great deal of energy, specifically in the gravel beds of high-energy streams. Before spawning, females lash the stream bed with their tails to create a pit or redd in the gravel, in which they lay their eggs to be fertilised  by males. Then she fills-in the redd with more gravel excavated from upstream. Salmon spawning grounds are thus easily recognised as pale patches of freshly overturned gravel on a stream bed that also contain lower amounts of fine sediment and are thereby loosened. As well as discouraging bibulous old men from diluting their liquor, it occurred to Alexander Fremier of Washington State University and other American colleagues that here was a noteworthy example of an active part of the biosphere physically intervening in the rock cycle. Not that it comes even close to what humans have become capable of since the Industrial Revolution, but it might be an object lesson in the fragility of what are otherwise the robust processes of erosion. Moreover, since salmon emerged at some time in the past, their actions might help demonstrate that evolutionary events – speciation, adaptive radiations, mass extinctions etc – play a role in transforming geological processes.

Pacific salmon are semelparous or "big ba...
Pacific Sock-eye salmon that die shortly after spawning (credit: Wikipedia)

Fremier and colleagues (Fremier, A.K. et al. 2017. Sex that moves mountains: The influence of spawning fish on river profiles over geologic timescales. Geomorphology online publication; doi.org/10.1016/j.geomorph.2017.09.033) modeled the consequences of salmon spawning habits for the critical stress needed to set grains in motion, theoretically and in a flume tank. Based on a significant reduction of the critical stress, models for the evolution on various river profiles in the vicinity of salmon spawning grounds suggest that river beds may cut deeper at rates up to 30% faster than they would in the absence of salmon. Were salmon to be reduced or extirpated through dam construction or overfishing then sedimentation in channels would increase. In some areas of extensive farming of salmon in offshore pens, escape and colonization of rivers would eventually change sedimentation and erosion patterns. The findings vary from species to species, but salmon may have had a significant effect on generally rugged landscapes following their appearance in local ecosystems.

The terrestrial-marine-terrestrial migratory habits of salmon, including the return of adults to their birth rivers to spawn, are uncommon if not unique. Their forbears must have evolved to this behaviour at some time in the geological past, separately in the case of North Atlantic and North Pacific species. The authors suggest that adaptive radiation of salmon may have been favoured by orogenic events in western North America around 100 Ma ago that created the system of fast flowing rivers that salmon favour. In turn, salmon may have significantly influenced Western Cordillera landscapes of Alaska, Canada and the conterminous Unites States. A nice example of the inseparability of cause and effect on the scale of the Earth System.

When did the Greenland ice cap last melt?

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The record preserved in cores through the thickest part of the Greenland ice cap goes back only to a little more than 120 thousand years ago, unlike in Antarctica where data are available for 800 ka and potentially further back still. One possible reason for this difference is that a great deal more snow falls on Greenland so the ice builds up more quickly than in Antarctica. Because ice flows under pressure this might imply that older ice on Greenland long flowed to the margins and either melted or calved off as icebergs. So, although it is certain that the Antarctic ice cap has not melted away, at least in the last million years or so, we cannot tell if Greenlandic glaciers did so over the same period of time. Knowing whether or not Greenland might have shed its carapace of ice is important, because if ever does in future the meltwater will add about 7 metres to global sea level: a nightmare scenario for coastal cities, low-lying islands and insurance companies.

Margin of the Greenland ice sheet (view from p...
Edge of the Greenland ice sheet with a large glacier flowing into a fjiord at the East Greenland coas  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One means of judging when Greenland was last free of ice, or at least substantially so, is based on more than a ice few metres thick being opaque to cosmic ‘rays’. Minerals, such as quartz, in rocks bared at the surface to ultra-high energy, cosmogenic neutrons accumulate short-lived isotopes of beryllium and aluminium – 10Be and 26Al with half-lives of 1.4 and 0.7 Ma. Once rocks are buried beneath ice or sediment, the two isotopes decay away and it is possible to estimate the duration of burial from the proportions of the remaining isotopes. After about 5 Ma the cosmogenic isotopes will have decreased to amounts that cannot be measured. Conversely, if the ice had melted away at any time in the past 5 Ma and then returned it should be possible to estimate the timing and duration of exposure of the surface to cosmic ‘rays’. Two groups of researchers have applied cosmogenic-isotope analysis to Greenland. One group (Schaefer, J.G. et al. 2016. Greenland was nearly ice-free for extended periods during the Pleistocene. Nature, v. 540, p. 252-255) focused on bedrock, currently buried beneath 3 km of ice, that drilling for the ice core finally penetrated. The other systematically analysed the cosmogenic isotope content of mineral grains at different depths in North Atlantic seafloor sediment cores, largely supplied from East Greenland since 7.5 Ma ago (Bierman, P.R. et al. 2016. A persistent and dynamic East Greenland Ice Sheet over the past 7.5 million years Nature, v. 540, p. 256-260). As their titles suggest, the two studies had conflicting results.

The glacigenic sediment grains contained no more than 1 atom of 10Be per gram compared with the 5000 to 6000 in grains deposited and exposed to cosmic rays along the shores of Greenland since the end of the last ice age. These results challenge the possibility of any significant deglaciation and exposure of bedrock in the source of seafloor sediment since the Pliocene.  The bedrock from the base of Greenland’s existing ice cap, however, contains up to 25 times more cosmogenic isotopes. The conclusion in that case is that there must have been a protracted, >280 ka, exposure of the rock surface in what is now the deepest ice cover at 1.1 Ma ago at most. Allowing for the likelihood of some persistent glacial cover in what would have been mountainous areas in an otherwise substantially deglaciated Greenland, the results are consistent with about 90% melting suggested by glaciological modelling.

Clearly, some head scratching is going to be needed to reconcile the two approaches. Ironically, the ocean-floor cores were cut directly offshore of the most likely places where patches of residual ice cap may have remained. Glaciers there would have transported rock debris that had remained masked from cosmic rays until shortly before calved icebergs or the glacial fronts melted and supplied sediment to the North Atlantic floor. If indeed the bulk of Greenland became ice free around a million years ago, under purely natural climatic fluctuations, the 2° C estimate for global warming by 2100 could well result in a 75% glacial melt and about 5-6 m rise in global sea level.

Read more about glaciation here and here.

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Scablands: megaflood hypothesis tempered

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Channeled Scablands during flood
Channeled Scablands at the time of a glacial lake outburst flood (credit: Wikipedia)

The eastern side of Washington State in the US includes a vast, barren area that has been scoured virtually free of superficial sediment, including soils. Its landscape is among the most odd in North America, consisting of a network of unusually wide canyons or couleés that incise a regional plateau formed by the Columbia River flood basalts. The now largely dry canyon floors contain immense potholes, megaripples and erratic boulders, together with strangely streamlined hillocks made of residual, windblown loess deposits, which collectively resemble features of normal river beds but at a gargantuan scale. The canyon network emerges from the Rocky Mountains near the city of Spokane, then criss-crosses what had previously been a wide basalt plain to merge with the Columbia River in southern Washington. The couleés are up to 100 km long and reach  100 m in depth.

Dry Falls, WA Français : Les Dry Falls dans l'...
Dry Falls in Grand Colee, Washington state, US, showing typical features of the Channelle Scablands. (credit: Wikipedia)

In the 1920s J. Harlen Bretz suggested that the Channelled Scablands had been formed by a massive flood, a view that met disbelief until his colleague Joseph Pardee discovered that a huge lake of glacial meltwater (Lake Missouala) had formed in the intricate valleys of the Montana Rockies when their outflow into Washington had been blocked by a southward-surging finger of the Cordilleran ice sheet. Lake Missouala is estimated to have been about half the size of modern Lake Michigan (~7700 km2) and up to 610 m deep, reaching a maximum volume of 2100 km3  between 15 to 13 ka ago. Bretz’s idea was vindicated; melting of the ice dam was widely thought to have produced a single vast outburst flood and the removal of approximately 320 km3 of basalt and loess. The later discovery of strandlines, similar to those on a smaller scale in Glen Roy, western Scotland, on the flanks of former lake modified the theory to a series of individual, but still huge outburst flood events. Their magnitudes, estimated by assuming that each filled the coulees to their brim, were thought to be up to 60 km3 per hour, i.e. 100 times greater than the largest recorded historically, that of the Amazon. A recent study tempers the awe long-associated with the Scablands.

Isaac Larsen and Michael Lamb of the University of Massachusetts and the California Institute of Technology examined Moses Couleé, one of the largest, in detail (Larsen, I.J. & Lamb, M.P. 2016. Progressive incision of the Channelled Scablands by outburst floods. Nature, v. 538, p. 229-232; doi;10.1038/nature19817). Terraces in Moses Couleé allow successive topographic profiles of the canyon to be reconstructed, and the flow features on its floor allow water depth during some of the flows to be estimated. Far from being brim-full at any time, except during the first incision, individual discharges of meltwater were probably 5 to 10 times less than those previously suggested. Moreover, the pattern of the Scablands reflects major fracture zones n the Columbia River flood basalts, which suggests that floods followed lines of least resistance and greatest ease of erosion by removal of joint-bound blocks of basalt. Yet the floods still reached a magnitude never recorded for modern ones, and Larsen and Lambs modelling may well apply to the even vaster outburst canyons on Mars, such as Valles Marineris.

See also: Perron, J.T. & Venditti, J.G. 2016, Megafloods downsized. Nature, v. 538, p. 174-175; nature.com/newsandviews

Picture of the month, June 2015

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SpheroidalIMG_4815
Spheroidally weathered basalt from Turkey. (credit: Francisco Sousa)

Spheroidal weathering of lavas, easily confused with pillows, is also found in other homogeneous igneous rocks. It develops from rectilinear joint sets along which the groundwater responsible for breakdown of silicates initially moves. Hydration reactions begin along the joints but proceed most quickly at corners so that curved surfaces begin to develop. The concentric  banding that sometimes culminates in almost spherical relics may involve more than just rotting of anhydrous silicates as the reactions involve volume increases that encourage further rock fracturing. Other factors, such as elastic strain release may also encourage the characteristic concentricity Prolonged, intense chemical weathering leaves isolated, rounded corestones surrounded by saprolite, that can form boulder fields when the softer weathered material has been eroded away.

Two large, reorganised landscapes

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Where tectonic processes proceed quickly it is only to be expected that the land surface undergoes dramatic changes and that big features form. Exactly which processes lay behind very striking landforms may have been worked out long ago; or old ideas from the heyday of geomorphology have perhaps lingered longer than they should. Two tectonically active regions that have a long history of study are the Himalaya and Iceland: one a model of long-lived and rapid uplift driven by collisional tectonics; the other likewise, as a product of extension and rapid build-up of flood basalt flows. Major features of both have been shown to be not quite what they seem.
Substantial parts of the India-Asia collision zone contain broad patches of high, low-relief plateaus separated by deeply incised river gorges. In its eastern parts rise 3 of the largest rivers in SE Asia: the Yangtse; the Mekong and the Salween, which flow roughly parallel to the east and south-east for about 1000 km from their sources in the Tibetan Plateau. Their trajectories partly follow some enormous strike-slip fault that accommodated the relative motion of two continent-bearing plates over the last 50 million years. As well as the crustal thickening that attended the collision, vast amounts of uplifted material have been eroded from the three major gorges. Thickening and unloading have been the key to producing the largest tracts of high land on the planet. Yet between the gorges and their many tributaries in the eastern part of the collision zone are many tracts of high land with only moderate relief rather than sharp ridges. Because the Eurasian plate prior to India’s impact might reasonably be expected to have been only moderately high, if not low lying, and with a mature and muted landscape, a long-lived theory has been that these elevated plateaus are uplifted relics of this former landscape that were dissected by progressively deepening river incision. Much the same idea has been applied to similar mega features, and even coincident peaks in more completely eroded highlands.

Drainage basins of the Yangtse, Mekong and Salween rivers, with low-relief surfaces in buff and cream. Figure 1 in Yang et al. 2015 (credit: Nature)
Drainage basins of the Yangtse, Mekong and Salween rivers, with low-relief surfaces in buff and cream. Figure 1 in Yang et al. 2015 (credit: Nature)

In the India-Asian collision zone the supposedly ‘relic’ plateaus have been used to reconstruct the pre-collision land surface and the degree of bulging it has undergone since. However, the advent of accurate digital terrain elevation data has enabled the modelling of not only the large rivers but also of the tributary streams that make up major drainage. As well as the directional aspects of drainages their along-channel slopes can be analysed (Yong, R. et al. 2015. In situ low-relief landscape formation as a result of river network disruption. Nature, v. 520, p. 526-529). Rong Yang of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and colleagues from the same department and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel have been able to show that matters are far more complex than once believed. The tributary drainages of the Yangtse, Mekong and Salween gorges appear to have been repeatedly been disrupted by the complexities of deformation. One important factor has been drainage capture or piracy, in which drainages with greater energy erode towards the heads of their catchments until they intercept a major drainage in another sub-basin, thereby ‘stealing’ the energy of the water that it carries. The ‘pirate’ stream then erodes more powerfully in its lower reaches, whereas the basin burgled of much of its energy becomes more sluggishly evolving thereafter and increasingly left anomalous high in the regional terrain: it evolves to liken what previously it had been supposed to be – a relic of the pre-collision landscape.
Many of the rivers in Iceland occupy gorges that contain a succession of large waterfalls. Upstream of each is a wide rock terrace, and downstream the gorge is eroded into such a terrace. Much of Iceland is composed of lava flows piled one above another, as befits the only substantial land that straddles a constructive plate margin – the mid-Atlantic Ridge. Being famous also for its substantial ice caps that are relics of one far larger during the last glacial maximum, it has proved irresistible for geomorphologists to assign the gorge-fall-terrace repetition to gradual uplift due to isostatic rebound as the former ice cap melted and unloaded the underlying lithosphere. As relative sea-level fell each river gained more gravitational potential energy to cut back up its channel, which resulted in a succession of upstream migrating waterfalls and gorges below them. Individual lava flows, being highly resistant to abrasion cease to be affected once cut by a gorge; hence the terraces. But it is now possible to establish the date when each terrace first became exposed to cosmic-ray bombardment, using the amount of cosmogenic 3He that has accumulated in the basalts that form the terrace surfaces (Baynes, E.R. et al. 2015. Erosion during extreme flood events dominates Holocene canyon evolution in northeast Iceland. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, doi:10.1073/pnas.1415443112).

Valley of Jökulsá á Fjöllum past Dettifoss, Jö...
Gorge incised in basalt flows, Jökulsárgljúfur National Park, Iceland (credit: Wikipedia)

The British-German team from the University of Edinburgh and Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum, Potsdam worked on terraces of the Jökulsárgljúfur canyon, discovering that three terraces formed abruptly in the Holocene, at 9, 5 and 2 ka ago, with no evidence for any gradual erosion by abrasion. Each terrace was cut suddenly, probably aided by the highly jointed nature of the overlying lava flow that would encourage toppling of blocks given sufficient energy. The team suggests that each represents not stages in uplift, but individual megafloods, perhaps caused by catastrophic glacial melting during subglacial eruptions or failures of dams formed by moraines or ice lobes.

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Explosive erosion in the Himalaya

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As the Yalung-Tsangpo River on the northern flank of the Himalaya approaches  a bend the rotates its flow by almost 180 degrees to become the Brahmaputra it enters one of the world’s largest canyons. Over the 200 km length of the Tsangpo Gorge the river descends two kilometres between peaks that tower 7 km above sea level. Since the area is rising tectonically and as a result of the unloading that attends erosion, for the Tsangpo to have maintained its eastward flow it has been suggested that an average erosion rate of 3 to 5 km per million years was maintained continuously over the last 3 to 5 Ma. However, new information from the sediments downstream of the gorge suggests that much of the gorge’s depth was cut during a series of sudden episodes (Lang, K.A. et al. 2013. Erosion of the Tsangpo Gorge by megafloods, Eastern Himalaya. Geology, v. 41, p. 1003-1006).

English: Map of the Yarlung Tsangpo River wate...
The Yarlung Tsangpo River watershed which drains the north slope of the Himalayas. (credit: Wikipedia)

It has become clear from a series of mountainside terraces that during the Pleistocene glaciers and debris from them often blocked the narrow valleys through which the river flowed along the northern flank of the Himalaya. Each blockage would have impounded enormous lakes upstream of the Tsangpo Gorge, containing up to 800 km3 of water. Failure of the natural dams would have unleashed equally spectacular floods. The researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle examined the valley downstream of the gorge, to find unconsolidated sediments as much as 150 m above the present channel. They have similar grain size distributions to flood deposits laid down some 30 m above the channel by a flood unleashed in 2000 by the failure of a temporary dam caused by a landslide. The difference is that the higher level deposits are densely vegetated and have well-developed soils: they are almost certainly relics of far larger floods in the distant past from the lakes betrayed by the terraces above the Tsangpo Gorge.

By measuring the age of zircons found in the megaflood deposits using the U/Pb methods the team  have been able to show that the sediments were derived mainly from 500 Ma crystalline basement in the Tsangpo Gorge itself rather than from the younger terranes in Tibet. There are four such deposits at separate elevations above the modern river below the gorge. Like the 2000 AD flood deposit, each terrace is capped by landslide debris suggesting that flooding and associated erosion destabilised the steep slopes so characteristic of the region. Because the valleys are so narrow (<200 m at the bottom), each flood would have been extremely deep, flows being of the order of a million cubic metres per second. The huge power would have been capable of moving blocks up to 18 m across with 1 m boulders being carried in suspension. It has been estimated that each of the floods would have been capable of removing material that would otherwise have taken up to 4000 years to erode at present rates of flow.

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The Grand Greenland Canyon

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One of the properties of radar is that it can pass through hundreds of metres of ice to be scattered by the bedrock beneath and return to the surface with sufficient remaining power to allow measurement of ice depth from the time between transmission of a pulse and that when the scattered energy returns to the antenna. Liquid water simply absorbs the radar energy preventing any return from the subsurface. As far as rocks and soils are concerned, any water in them and the structure of minerals from which they are composed limit penetration and energy return to at most only a few metres. While radar images that result from scattering by the Earth’s solid surface are highly informative about landforms and variations in the surface’s small-scale texture, outside of seismic reflection profiling, only ice-penetrating radar (IPR) approaches the ‘holy grail’ of mapping what lies beneath the surface in 3-D. Unlike seismic surveys it can be achieved from aircraft and is far cheaper to conduct.

English: Topographic map of Greenland bedrock,...
Greenland’s topography without the ice sheet. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It was IPR that revealed the scattering of large lakes at the base of the Antarctic ice cap, but a survey of Greenland has revealed something even more astonishing: major drainage systems. These include a vast canyon that meanders beneath the thickest part of the ice towards the island’s north coast (Bamber, J.L. et al. 2013. Palaeofluvial mega-canyon beneath the central Greenland ice sheet. Science, v. 341, p. 997-999). At 750 km long and a maximum depth of 800 m it is comparable with active canyon systems along the Colorado and Nile rivers in the western US and Ethiopia respectively. A less-well publicised feature is ancient leaf-shaped system of buried valleys further south that emerges in a great embayment on West Greenland’s coast near Uummannaq, which may be the catchment of another former river system. In fact much of the data that revealed what appears to be pre-glacial topography dates back to the 1970s, though most was acquired since 2000. The coverage by flight lines varies a great deal, and as more flights are conducted, yet more detail will emerge.

The British, Canadian and Italian discoverers consider that glacial meltwater sinking to the base of the ice cap continues to follow the canyon, perhaps lubricating ice movement. The flatter topography beneath the Antarctic ice cap is not so easy to drain, which probably accounts for the many sub-glacial lakes there whereas none of any significance have been detected in Greenland. The earliest time when Greenland became ice-bound was about 5 Ma ago, so that is the minimum age for the river erosion that carved the canyon

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Update on a classic British field site

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English: Glacial erratic, Norber One of severa...
Glacial erratic at Norber Brown that sits nicely on a limestone plinth, dues to the erratic’s having protected the limestone underneath from erosion. (credit: Wikipedia)

Few expect Earth scientists to get all sentimental, but they do. My soft spot is for one of the most rewarding and least strenuous geological sites in Britain, Norber Brow near Austwick on the southern edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. As well as the famous glacial erratics of Silurian greywackes perched on Lower Carboniferous limestone, 250 m to the SE by a well-trodden path is the inverse, the Variscan unconformity at the base of the Carboniferous on the very same Silurian formation. I was lucky to be taken there at age 15 by Roy Happs who taught A-level Geology, and it decided my future, there and then.

The erratics don’t just site on the limestone, but are on pedestals up to 30 cm above the surrounding limestone surface as if carefully balanced by Beowulf’s assailant Grendel. Somehow, since the time glacial flow had deposited the Silurian boulders the underlying limestone had been dissolved away; but how fast was that? That is the key to the pace at which limestone pavement, to most general visitors such a stunning and unexpected feature of the Dales, might have formed. And such a delight to hear of its terminology: clints, redolent of the former Viking people of the Dales, that stand proud between deep fissures known as grikes, a suitably ominous term of unknown derivation. Such superbly fractal landforms are, of course, but one part of karst (from the eponymous region of limestone country in Slovenia).

English: Limestone Pavement at Twisleton Scar ...
A classic limestone pavement in the Yorkshire Dales National Park (credit: Wikipedia)

It is really satisfying to discover that a lot of cutting-edge science has recently been aimed at Norber from a substantial review in Earth Pages’ sister journal Geology Today (Wilson, P. et al. 2013. Dating in the Craven Dales. Geology Today, v. 29 (January-February Issue), p. 16-22). The length of time that the Norber erratics have been exposed to cosmic-ray bombardment has been determined from 10Be, 26Al and 36Cl analyses with a precision of ±1000 years to 17.9 ka, shortly after the last glacial maximum (LGM) when warming and glacial melting had just begun in this part of Yorkshire. That might seem to indicate an average of 330 mm of limestone had been dissolved over that period to form the pedestals, i.e. a dissolution rate averaging about 20 micrometres per year, which is extremely rapid, geologically speaking. In 1962 when I was show the site we were told that elsewhere the limestone pavement had formed since the first field systems (Iron Age) were laid out as now useless drystone walls crossed it. Roy Happs somewhat darkly suggested that they had formed since the start of the Industrial Revolution because of acid rain.

He was pretty much wrong on that score, but cosmogenic dating of the clints shows significant discrepancies between the age of deposition of the erratics and  and the exposure age of the clints. This suggests both chemical dissolution and also periods of frost shattering and gravel removal, perhaps by soil creep. Dating of other materials enlivens the history of local landform development. Another karstic feature is the presence of sinkholes or dolines that are often filled with yellowish silts that show clear textural evidence of being windblown sediments or loess. These aeolian sediments have long been regarded as post-LGM too, but optically stimulated luminescence dating of their quartz grains gives an age split between pre- (27.5 ± 2.6 ka) and post-LGM (16.5 ± 1.7 ka). Some loess elsewhere in Craven district comes out to be as young as 8.2 ka, to tally with evidence from Greenlandic ice cores for a sudden deterioration in North Atlantic seaboard climate during this early time in the Holocene.

Then there are the local caves, renowned in Victorian times for their cave bears and other mammal fossils. One bear skull from Victoria Cave in the Craven area gave a 14C age of 14.6 ± 0.4 ka which statistically coincides with that from a cut-marked horse vertebra. More than likely the bears were turfed out when humans reached Craven, but did they return when humans fled in the face of the Younger Dryas return to frigid-desert conditions? Probably not, as the YD would almost have sterilized what are now the Yorkshire Dales. Even earlier ages of 114 ka from U-Th dating of calcite flowstone that embeds hippo, elephant, rhino and hyena bones in Victoria Cave date to the previous Eemian interglacial. Indeed this speleothem has yielded ages as far back as the limit of the U-Th method (%00 ka). On a solo expedition in 1964 I had the chance to sleep-over in Victoria Cave, but pressed on with goose bumps to the nearby Youth Hostel.

Grand Canyon now the Grand Old Canyon?

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Grand Canyon in Winter
Grand Canyon in Winter (credit: Wikipedia)

Among the best known and certainly the most visited topographic feature on the planet, the Grand Canyon resulted from erosion by the Colorado River keeping pace with uplift of the south-central United States. It is the archetype for what is known as antecedent drainage. Since that uplift is still going on, albeit slowly, the Grand Canyon has been assumed to be a relative young landform. By dating the first appearance of debris from the eastern end of the canyon in sediments at its western limit geomorphologists estimated that incision began around 6 Ma ago. Yet a range of other observations present puzzling contradictions. One means of settling the issue is to somehow to date the uplift radiometrically.

A long-used technique is to determine ‘cooling ages’ of crustal rocks exposed by uplift and erosion, exploiting the way in which rock temperature determines whether or not products of radioactive decay cab be preserved intact. One method uses the tracks of defects produced by electrons or helium nuclei from radioactive decay as they pass through various minerals that incorporate high amounts of elements such as uranium. Above a certain temperature the fission tracks anneal and disappear quickly, while below it they accumulate over time. Quantifying that build-up allows the date of cooling below the threshold temperature to be estimated. Similarly, gases produced by radioactive decay of some radioactive isotopes, such as argon from the decay of 40K or helium from uranium and thorium isotopes, can only stay in their host mineral if it remains cooler than a narrow range of temperatures. As rock rises towards the Earth’s surface, it starts out hot at depth but cools by conduction as it get closer to the surface. For the 1.8 km of uplift of the Grand Canyon and the relatively cool nature of the underlying crust, neither the fission-track nor the  40Ar/39Ar cooling-age methods give meaningful results. However, minerals lose helium at temperatures above about 70°C, so a method based on helium accumulation from uranium and thorium isotope decay is a possible means of assessing uplift timing. But there have been plenty of snags to overcome to make this approach reliable. In the case of the Grand Canyon analytical quality and careful sample collection has given a credible result (Flowers, R.M. & Farley, K.A. 2012. Apatite 4He/3He and (U-Th)He evidence for an ancient Grand Canyon. Science , doi 10.1126/science.1229390)

Flowers and Farley from the University of Colorado at Boulder and the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, respectively, produced a result that completely overturns previous conceptions. The western end of the Canyon had been incised to within a few hundred metres of modern depths by 70 Ma ago; more than ten times earlier than previously thought. The eastern end has a more complex history that reveals cooling events in the Neogene as well as an end-Cretaceous initiation of uplift and erosion. Their data are consistent with early incision of the Grand Canyon by a Cretaceous river flowing eastward from the Western Cordillera, with a reversal of flow in the late-Tertiary as uplift of the Colorado Plateau began and western mountains subsided. Whether or not this fits with Cretaceous and later geological history of the SW US, is beyond my ken, but you can bet there will be a storm of comment from US geomorphologists once the paper appears in the print issue of Science.

Greening and changing the land

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English: Liverwort Liverworts are small plants...
A very British liverwort mat. Image via Wikipedia

Evidence for the earliest colonisation of the continents by plants is in the form of spores and body fragments from terrestrial sediments of Middle Ordovician age (~470 Ma) (Rubinstein, C.  et al. 2010. Early Middle Ordovician evidence for land plants in Argentina (eastern Gondwana). New Phytologist, v. 188, p. 365-369)suggest that the first vegetation cover involved simple ground-hugging plants that lacked stems of roots, very like the liverworts that I struggle to deter from my gravel drive. Vinegar is the only solution, preferably boiling, but that does not harm their spores and inevitably they re-emerge. Rearranging the gravel, of a pale pink limestone, is one of a very few means of keeping fit that I can bear, and I suppose the liverworts spice that up a little: but I do detest them. Part of their irritation is that they form an impermeable coating to what once was a passable if minor aquifer that channelled rainfall that would otherwise repeat the house-flooding that greeted me within a day of my moving in. So it was with some solemnity that I read a paper on how these damnable organisms transformed the Ordovician continental surface and the geomorphological processes that shaped it (Gibling, M.R. & Davies, N.S 2012. Palaeozoic landscapes shaped by plant evolution. Nature Geocience, v. 5, p. 99-105).

Sedimentologists have shown that rivers of earlier times formed wide tracts of ephemeral braided channels that transported and reworked sands and gravels that were not hampered by any vegetable binding agent. Floods merely accelerated the braiding and spread coarse sediment across valley floors, repeated spates washing out almost of the fines to take them ultimately to the continental shelves: there are few if any relics of Cambrian and older muddy floodplains. Moreover, untrammelled by vegetation any remaining fine material would be picked up by wind, even in humid climates, to meet the same marine fate. Overbank deposits of silts and clays, unsurprisingly, demand banks over or through which floodwater  escapes from defined channels and is then delayed by low gradients away from the main flow, so to deposit the fines carried by its sluggish speed. Except in arid terrains where braided channels are still the rule, in succeeding geological time evidence grows for nowadays familiar channels, meanders with point bars and eroded opposite banks, levées and floodplains on every conceivable scale. Apparently, they became conspicuous in Silurian times and then forming 30% of all fluvial sediments by the Devonian.

Meanwhile, plants were diversifying though evolution of vascular systems that transport sap up supporting structures that emerged in parallel eventually to form trunks and branches. The consequent rise in volume and in area exposed to sunlight and photosynthesis of a plant’s tissues increased the potential to draw CO2 from the air, witnessed by changes in carbon isotopes that show carbon burial rising shortly after the mid-Ordovician from far lower values in earlier times. (Incidentally, it seems likely that such meagre colonisers as early liverworts thrived sufficiently to contribute to the cooling in the Upper Ordovician that led to sporadic glacial episodes).  Preservation of wood in peats – liverworts are not implicated in any kind of fossil-fuel production – helped to maximise carbon burial by the end of the Palaeozoic Era. But trees make logs and, carried by rivers, logjams. By the Upper Carboniferous effects of damming become common in fluvial sediments, which seemed to serve the formation of islands within wide river channels.

By the present day, vegetation has come to dominate all but the most arid river systems. Even in central Australia sturdy gums able only to get water from below ephemeral river beds end up defining the flow regime and stabilising it on low relief plains that would otherwise be ravaged by sheet floods every rainy season. The authors support stratigraphic observations through the use of scaled down models of channels in vegetated areas by the cunning use of alfalfa seeded to sprout during simulated dry conditions then resuming channel flow in a flume tank.

Gilboa Fossils - Gilboa, New York
Fossils tree stumps from Gilboa, New York (Photo credit: Dougtone)

The earliest substantial trees, represented by wood fragments rarely assignable to any particular structure, occur in the Middle Devonian (385-400 Ma). Although some groups can be differentiated, how their encompassing woodland ecosystems looked has been a mystery until recently . Being ‘priitive’ it has been assumed to be very simple, unlike the well-documented forests of the Carboniferous coal swamps. But, once in a while, a site of exceptional preservation is unearthed, one such being a palaeosol that clearly formed on the floor of a Middle Devonian woodland exposed by quarrying in New York state, USA (Stein, W.E. et al. 2012. Surprisingly complex community found in the mid-Devonian fossil forest at Gilboa. Nature, v. 483, p. 78-81). Once backfill accumulated during the quarry’s active life was removed it became possible to plot the arrangement of roots systems of the last trees to live at the site before inundation and preservation.  Together with other plant material found in the ancient soil, the growing sites have been reconstructed to assess the full ecosystem involved. It was a great deal more complex than previously thought possible, with a series of tiers formed by three large tree types: tall, lollipop-like Eospermatopteris; smaller lycopsid-like trees and subsurface propagators related to gymnosperms that sprouted to form an understorey that may have climbed the larger trees in the manner of vines. Its setting was akin to that of modern mangrove swamps – by the sea – subject to sea-level change that inundated, killed and preserved the coastal woodland.

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Low-lying Tibet before India-Asia collision

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The Tibetan plateau lies between the Himalayan...
The semi-arid Tibetan Plateau from spaceImage via Wikipedia

The vast Tibetan Plateau at an average elevation of 4500 m is a major influence on the climate of Asia, being central to the annual monsoons, as well as one the world’s largest continental tectonic features. When it formed is crucial in palaeoclimatic modelling as well as to geomorphologists and structural geologists. Whether or not it was present before the Indian subcontinent collided with Asia at 50 Ma has been the subject of perennial debate; it could have formed during the more or less continual accretion of terranes to southern Eurasia since the Jurassic Period. A novel approach to timing uplift of Tibet is obviously needed to resolve the controversies, and that may have been achieved (Hetzel, R. et al. 2011. Peneplain formation in southern Tibet predates the India-Asia collision and plateau uplift.  Geology, v.39, p.983-986). North of Lhasa is an area of coincident small plateaus at around 5200-5400 m into which are cut valleys a few hundred metres. It has the hallmarks of a peneplain stripped to the base level of erosion, and developed on Cretaceous granites. The German-Chinese-South African team applied a range of geochronological techniques to date the emplacement of the granites and their cooling history. U/Pb dating shows the granites to have crystallised between 120 to 110 Ma; U-Th/He dating of zircons in them indicate their cooling from 180° to 60°C between 90 and 70 Ma; apatite  U-Th/He and fission-track dating show that the granites experienced surface temperatures by around 55 Ma during a period of erosion at a rate of 200-400 m Ma-1. The clear inference is that an area >10 000 km2 became a peneplain by the end of the Palaeocene, to be unconformably overlain by Eocene continental redbeds.

By the Eocene the northern Lhasa Block had become a low-elevation plain from which a vast amount of sediment had been removed to be deposited elsewhere – Palaeocene and Eocene sediments are not common throughout the whole Tibetan Plateau. This is strong evidence that uplift of the Plateau only began after the India-Asia collision during the Eocene. Despite that and the erosion that would have taken place, much of the peneplain remains; given resistant bedrock peneplains can be very long-lived.

Threat to landscape from alien crayfish?

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Pacifastacus leniusculus 5
Image via Wikipedia

The stealthy invasion of rivers in Europe by the tasty American signal crayfish Pacifastacus leniusculus poses a threat not only to the indigenous European species Astacus astacus (P. leniusculus carries a fungal infection as well as being formidably armed), but conceivably to the very landscape itself (Johnson, M.F. et al. 2010. Topographic disturbance of subaqueous gravel substrates by signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus). Geomorphology, v. 123, p. 269-278). Johnson and colleagues from the University of Loughborough, UK used captive alien crayfish to model the effects of their bioturbation under controlled laboratory conditions, assessing their activity by the use of millimetre-resolution gravel-surface elevation data generated by a laser altimeter. The sturdy little beasts behave like frenzied bulldozers creating mounds and pits in the gravel substrate, displacing on average about 1.7 kg of gravel every day over an area of 1 m2 thereby completely disrupting the perfectly flat experimental substrate onto which they were introduced in about 3 days. By this activity they render the surface more prone to erosion by flowing water so that greater grain transport ensues; they could effect bother erosion and deposition by increasing transportation of grains. To my knowledge, this is the first experimental study of bioturbation in the context of hydrology. We can expect more now that the technology is available: the burrowers as well as the diggers of the animal world. While the Phanerozoic is best know for having begun with the Cambrian Explosion of multicellular life, a sometimes overlooked attribute is that it coincided with the start of bioturbation. That may well have had a profound effect on sediment transport as the American invader suggests.
See also: Newton, A. 2010. Crayfish at work. Nature Geoscience, v. 3, p. 592

Threat to landscape from alien crayfish?

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The stealthy invasion of rivers in Europe by the tasty American signal crayfish Pacifastacus leniusculus poses a threat not only to the indigenous European species Astacus astacus (P. leniusculus carries a fungal infection as well as being formidably armed), but conceivably to the very landscape itself (Johnson, M.F. et al. 2010. Topographic disturbance of subaqueous gravel substrates by signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus). Geomorphology, v. 123, p. 269-278). Johnsson and colleagues from the University of Loughborough, UK used captive alien crayfish to model the effects of their bioturbation under controlled laboratory conditions, assessing their activity by the use of millimetre-resolution gravel-surface elevation data generated by a laser altimeter. The sturdy little beasts behave like frenzied bulldozers creating mounds and pits in the gravel substrate, displacing on average about 1.7 kg of gravel every day over an area of 1 m2 thereby completely disrupting the perfectly flat substrate onto which they were introduced in about 3 days. By this activity they render the surface more prone to erosion by flowing water so that greater grain transport ensues; they could effect bother erosion and deposition by increasing transportation of grains. To my knowledge, this is the first experimental study of bioturbation in the context of hydrology. We can expect more now that the technology is available: the burrowers as well as the diggers of the animal world. While the Phanerozoic is best know for having begun with the Cambrian Explosion of multicellular life, a sometimes overlooked attribute is that it coincided with the start of bioturbation. That may well have had a profound effect on sediment transport as the American invader suggests.

See also: Newton, A. 2010. Crayfish at work. Nature Geoscience, v. 3, p. 592

Catastrophic canyon formation

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Huge canyons, such as the Grand Canyon and the Gorge of the Blue Nile, have generally been supposed to have resulted from steady-state erosion through resistant rocks, accelerating during annual floods. There are exceptions that produced spectacular gorges during emptying of proglacial lakes in North America and on a lesser scale in northern Britain. Just how efficient at erosion individual floods may be was demonstrated by release of reservoir water through a spillway in Texas for about 3 days in 2002 (Lamb M.P. & Fonstad, M.A. 2010. Rapid formation of a modern bedrock canyon by a single flood event. Nature Geoscience, v. 3, p. 477-481). The peak discharge was ~1500 m3s-1, which is not especially huge, yet up to 12 m of erosion occurred through bedrock to produce a sizeable canyon in what was previously a typical small stream valley. Although some erosion was by plucking of joint blocks a considerable amount occurred by potholes scoured by boulders swirling in the rapid currents. Small islands, resembling those preserved in glacial lake outburst floods, were sculpted mainly by suspended sediment rather than by boulder impacts. Another feature that forces a rethink of erosional processes is that waterfalls show no sign of headward retreat by undercutting, but seem to have formed as slabs were plucked by the hydraulic force and slid down stream to form tabular boulders. The implication is that canyons may form episodically during flood events, when the shear stress of the flow on its bed is sufficient to lift and slide joint-bounded slabs.

Catastrophic canyon formation

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Huge canyons, such as the Grand Canyon and the Gorge of the Blue Nile, have generally been supposed to have resulted from steady-state erosion through resistant rocks, accelerating during annual floods. There are exceptions that produced spectacular gorges during emptying of proglacial lakes in North America and on a lesser scale in northern Britain. Just how efficient at erosion individual floods may be was demonstrated by release of reservoir water through a spillway in Texas for about 3 days in 2002 (Lamb M.P. & Fonstad, M.A. 2010. Rapid formation of a modern bedrock canyon by a single flood event. Nature Geoscience, v. 3, p. 477-481). The peak discharge was ~1500 m3s-1, which is not especially huge, yet up to 12 m of erosion occurred through bedrock to produce a sizeable canyon in what was previously a typical small stream valley. Although some erosion was by plucking of joint blocks a considerable amount occurred by potholes scoured by boulders swirling in the rapid currents. Small islands, resembling those preserved in glacial lake outburst floods, were sculpted mainly by suspended sediment rather than by boulder impacts. Another feature that forces a rethink of erosional processes is that waterfalls show no sign of headward retreat by undercutting, but seem to have formed as slabs were plucked by the hydraulic force and slid down stream to form tabular boulders. The implication is that canyons may form episodically during flood events, when the shear stress of the flow on its bed is sufficient to lift and slide joint-bounded slabs.

The Younger Dryas flood

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In 2006 Wallace Broeker first suggested that the sudden interruption of emergence from the last glacial maximum by a frigid climate about 12.8 ka was due to a massive release of fresh water to the North Atlantic that shut down its thermohaline ‘conveyor’ (see The Younger Dryas and the Flood in June 2006 issue of EPN). He resurrected an earlier idea that a vast lake of glacial meltwater (Lake Agassiz) to the north-west of the Great Lakes of North America burst down the St Lawrence Seaway, instead of quietly escaping to the Gulf of Mexico along the Missouri-Mississippi system. His hypothesis was that the resulting freshening of surface water in the North Atlantic and decreased density stopped the formation of cold dense brines that sink and drag warm water northwards. Setting aside the notion by some enthusiastic authors that a trigger for the Younger Dryas was an exploding comet and a kind of ‘nuclear winter’ (see Whizz-bang view of Younger Dryas and Impact cause for Younger Dryas draws flak in EPN July 2007 and May 2008) Broeker’s hypothesis is widely accepted. However there are few signs, if any, of a catastrophic glacial-lake outburst through the Great Lakes region and down the St Lawrence. An alternative is that Lake Agassiz drained northwards towards the Arctic Ocean. (Since the North American ice sheet covered Hudson’s Bay that could not have been the destination.) At the end of the last last full glaciation there was a corridor with relatively little glacial cover between the main ice over the Canadian Shield and that mantling the Rocky Mountains, roughly along the course of the modern Mackenzie River. That route would serve the hypothesis well, and there is clear evidence that an outburst flood followed it (Murton, J.B. et al. 2010. Identification of Younger Dryas outburst flood path from Lake Agassiz to the Arctic Ocean. Nature, v. 464, p. 740-743).

Sediments of the huge Mackenzie Delta of NW Canada contain a sharp erosion surface overlain by gravels that belie the low-energy of deposition today. Optically stimulated luminescence dating of sediment immediately below and above the erosion surface range from 13.4 (below) to 12.7 ka (above), the latter approximating the onset of frigid Younger Dryas conditions. The surface occurs all the way along the Mackenzie into its major tributary the Athabasca River. Near Fort MacMurray, 20 km north of what was the northern shore of Lake Agassiz, there is a terrace composed of massive boulders. Further evidence comes from the apex of the Mackenzie delta in the form of a 25 km long, 2 km wide spillway scoured of all loose sediment and with topographic features reminiscent of the famous Channelled Scablands of Washington State in the NW USA. Numerous beach lines record the drainage of Lake Agassiz, the highest being dated at the start of the Younger Dryas and giving a clue to the volume involved in the initial outburst flood: around 9500 km3. Dating of other features suggest that a second flooding into the Arctic Ocean occurred during the Younger Dryas around 11.5 ka, during its last stages, and a third at 9.3 ka. One effect of the Younger Dryas was a regrowth of the main ice sheet that allowed Lake Agassiz to refill periodically perhaps allowing quieter flooding events down the Mississippi and through the Great Lakes. There are no signs in the climate record of any major perturbation at 9.3 ka.

Broeker received the news graciously, commenting that a freshening of the Arctic Ocean would have been more effective at shutting down North Atlantic thermohaline circulation than a spillway down the St Lawrence, because the sites of modern day sinking of dense cold brine lie well to the north of its outlet. The only way additional water in the Arctic Ocean could escape would have been into the northernmost North Atlantic.

See also: Schiermeier, Q. & Monastersky, R. 2010. River reveals chilling tracks of ancient flood. Nature, v. 464, p. 657.

Mystery of the sands unmasked

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One of the delights of Google Earth is to commit a little Thesigery in the comfort of your front room and traverse the Sahara, the Empty Quarter of Arabia, the Namib or the Gobi. Not only are there dunes on gargantuan scales, but zooming-in from 30 m Landsat to 65 cm Quickbird images on Google Earth reveals a dune hierarchy down to largish ripples. And not all dunes are classic in shape. In the same issue of Nature as a retrospective review of Ralph Bagnold’s classic The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes, French, Algerian and US workers give a clue to the fundamental controls over dunes systems, that was not available to early researchers (Andreotti, B. et al 2009. Giant aeolian dune size determined by the average depth of the atmospheric boundary layer. Nature, v. 457, p. 1120-1123). They conclude that the general dynamics are analogous to those in flowing water; i.e. like a river, the wind has a capping surface that is the thermal inversion in the atmosphere marked by the tropopause. Flow that is  physically bounded involves a series of resonances (as in a flute), which help to explain the tiered nature of dune systems and also their maximum size in a particular area of desert. Together with seasonal shifts in wind direction, fluctuations in the ‘depth’ of the wind combine together to produce the hypnotically addictive disorganised order that makes big sand deserts so attractive, despite their dangers.

Does glaciation preserve the Tibetan plateau?

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At first glance this section’s title seems absurd, for glaciation has the highest potential for erosion that there is on Earth. Yet it seems that at the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau the long-term potential for river erosion has been impeded by glacial action (Korup, O. & Montgomery, D.R. 2008. Tibetan plateau river incision inhibited by glacial stabilisation of the Tsangpo gorge. Nature, v. 455, p. 786-789). The accepted wisdom is that in the course of powerful rivers, such as the Tsangpo, steep stretches or ‘knick points’ focus erosion that proceeds headwards to drive a wave of dissection towards the sources of the main river and of all its tributaries. The Tsangpo has had the better part of 40-50 Ma since the India-Asia collision to eat away the vast Tibetan Plateau, but it has failed, as have other, lesser river systems. Repeatedly emplaced moraine dams, seem to have locked the knick points associated with the Tsangpo catchment at around 260 separate locations.

See also: Owen, L.A. 2008. How Tibet might keep its edge. Nature, v. 455, p. 748-749.

Watermills and meanders

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The classic notion of a floodplain is that the streams responsible for it meander to create point bars, overbank muds and all the other paraphernalia of the fluvial sedimentologist. River authorities seeking to restore floodplains see the meandering stream as the ideal to aim for, and increasingly as a means of natural flood amelioration. All this may turn out to be illusory following publication of a study on long-vanished human activities (Walter, R.C. & Merritts, D.J. 2008. Natural streams and the legacy of water-powered mills. Science, v. 319, p. 299-304). By mapping and dating alluvial deposits along 1st to 3rd order streams in the north-eastern USA, in relation to milldams recorded on 19th century maps, Walter and Merritts of Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania found that up to 5 metres of sediment had accumulated behind the dams since the 17th century up to the abandonment of watermills.

The conclusion is that mill dams together with increased sediment load following deforestation for agriculture created valley flats on a vast scale – three counties in Pennsylvania had over a thousand mill dams. In places along the north-eastern Piedmont the density of water mills reaches as many as one per square kilometre, and the median density of around 1 per 10 km2 involved more than 22 000 mills out of a total in 1840 of >65 000. Once the mills were abandoned, either because their dams had silted up or milling turned to larger facilities powered other energy sources, streams developed meanders that gradually incised the artificial flood plains. The situation now is that the small floodplains rarely flood, spates being unable to spill over the current bank height. Consequently, many of the low-order streams in major river catchments discharge floods quickly to the larger streams and rivers, which themselves burst their banks to cause floods with major social and economic consequences.

Walter and Merritts’ findings are also based on their analysis of the kinds of sediment that accumulated before European colonisation. In most small valleys these indicate extensive forested wetlands with multiple small channels and drier islands. A major influence over this earlier state was the formation of logjams, and perhaps beaver lodges, that spread normal and spate flows. Slow steam flow carried less sediment than nowadays, and the older Holocene alluvial deposits are organic rich. In addition, stream flow, once directly connected to groundwater, has become disconnected thereby reducing both recharge and the flood balancing achieved by truly natural streams.

The whole of Europe had a history of milling around five times as long as that in the eastern USA, as well as higher population densities. In addition, urban mill dams for metal forging and textile manufacture were on a larger scale. The UK’s National River Authority, Environment Agency and Phil Woolas, the Minister of State (Environment) need to read this study with care, as another flood season is almost certain in the summer of 2008 or the winter of 2008-9. As far as I can judge, it demands a reassessment of flood prevention ‘best practice’ in any populated humid-temperate landscape. Whatever, Walter and Merritts’ study forces a new look at the European lowland and upland geomorphology used for teaching at all levels.

Is weathering due to the weather?

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The name ‘weathering’ has always been taken to indicate a direct relationship between the atmosphere and the breakdown of rocks, i.e. at or very close to the surface. This is so easy to test that it comes as a surprise to find that nobody has really tried until recently (Yokoyama, T. & Matsukura, Y. 2006. Field and laboratory experiments on weather rate of granodiorite: Separation of chemical and physical processes. Geology, v. 34, p. 809-812). Tadashi Yokoyama and Yukinori Matsukura of universities of Osaka and Tsukuba, Japan, placed small cut tablets of identical fresh granodiorite in three position: at the surface, buried above the water table and buried beneath the water table in one small catchment. These samples stayed there for 10 years. The only sample to show much sign of chemical breakdown of minerals was that buried below the water table. Does anyone claim that there is weather in groundwater? Just exposing fresh granodiorite in the laboratory to a constant flow of water chemically similar to the groundwater doesn’t accomplish the weathering (it is 50 times slower than when samples are buried). Chemical weathering needs to involve soaking, when grain boundaries break down so that individual grains can become detached and allow yet more penetration.

Most geoscientists who work on topics that involve chemical weathering, such as the changing release of tracer isotopes of strontium to estimate rates of weathering in the past, assume that it is all done by atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolved in rainwater or released by organisms in soil. It is accomplished by hydrogen ions that can be released by a great deal more processes than the formation of vary weak carbonic acid (e.g. organic acids and breakdown of sulfides). It now seems very clear that chemical weathering is a product of groundwater and burial, so should we call it weathering at all?