Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Geomorphology
Lithologic controls on the form of soil mantled hillslopes
Published: 2018-07-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Slopes in steady-state soil-mantled landscapes tend to increase downslope in a way that balances local transport capacity with the sediment supplied from progressively larger source areas. Most formulations of sediment transport due to hillslope processes scale transport rate with local slope, which produces convex-up forms that are independent of the properties of the underlying lithologies. In [...]
Tectonic and oceanographic process interactions archived in the Late Cretaceous to Present deep-marine stratigraphy on the Exmouth Plateau, offshore NW Australia
Published: 2018-07-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geology, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy, Tectonics and Structure
Deep-marine deposits provide a valuable archive of process interactions between sediment gravity flows, pelagic sedimentation, and thermo-haline bottom-currents. Stratigraphic successions can also record plate-scale tectonic processes (e.g. continental breakup and shortening) that impact long-term ocean circulation patterns, including changes in climate and biodiversity. One such setting is the [...]
Digital photogrammetry of historical aerial photographs using open-source software
Published: 2018-07-06
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Programming Languages and Compilers, Software Engineering
Several collections of aerial photographs have been acquired in the Dominican Republic during the last 70 years. Although many of these sources are increasingly becoming available as scanned images, limited digital photogrammetric processing has been done, mainly because of the unaffordable prices of proprietary software licenses and the lack of clear workflows for processing historical photos. [...]
Delayed Recognition of Geomorphology Papers in The Geological Society of America Bulletin
Published: 2018-07-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Geological Society of America Bulletin was an early home for quantitative geomorphology research. Though geomorphology papers are not uniformly the highest cited papers in the Bulletin, many show ‘delayed recognition’ —they garner only few citations directly after publication, before suddenly being widely and numerously cited (sometimes decades after publication). I focus here on 1) [...]
Palaeolithic artefact deposits at Wadi Dabsa, Saudi Arabia; a multi-scalar geoarchaeological approach to building an interpretative framework
Published: 2018-06-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Surface artefacts dominate the archaeological record of arid landscapes, particularly the Saharo-Arabian belt, a pivotal region in dispersals out of Africa. Discarded by hominins, these artefacts are key to understanding past landscape use and dispersals, yet behavioural interpretation of present-day artefact distributions cannot be carried out without understanding how geomorphological processes [...]
Landscape classification with deep neural networks.
Published: 2018-06-18
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Computer Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Other Statistics and Probability, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability
The application of deep learning, specifically deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), to the classification of remotely sensed imagery of natural landscapes has the potential to greatly assist in the analysis and interpretation of geomorphic processes. However, the general usefulness of deep learning applied to conventional photographic imagery at a landscape scale is, at yet, largely [...]
Effects of shoal margin collapses on the morphodynamics of a sandy estuary
Published: 2018-06-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Shoal margin collapses of several Mm3 have occurred in the Western Scheldt estuary, the Netherlands, on average five times a year over the last decades. While these collapses involve significant volumes of material, their effect on the channel‐shoal morphology is unknown. We hypothesize that collapses dynamicise the channel‐shoal interactions, which could impact the ecological functioning, flood [...]
Detrital Zircons from the Amazon river-to-fan system reveal base level controls on land-to-sea sediment transfer
Published: 2018-06-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology
Large tropical sediment routing systems have relatively stable output fluxes over observable timescales. However, the functioning of sediment transfer in these systems across Pleistocene climate and sea-level fluctuations is not well documented. Here, we use new U-Pb detrital zircon (DZ) geochronology from the Pleistocene Amazon submarine fan (n=1,362 grains) to investigate provenance signatures [...]
Growing forced bars determine non-ideal estuary planform
Published: 2018-05-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The planform of estuaries is often described with an ideal shape, which exponentially converges in landward direction. We show how growing topographically forced nonmigratory (i.e., anchored) bars determine the large-scale estuary planform, which explains the deviations observed in the planform of natural estuaries filled with bars compared to the ideal planform. Experiments were conducted in a [...]
Rivers, reefs, and deltas; Geomorphological evolution of the Jurassic of the Farsund Basin, offshore southern Norway
Published: 2018-04-26
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure
In many petroleum-bearing, data-poor ‘frontier’ basins, source, reservoir, and seal distribution is poorly constrained, making it difficult to identify petroleum systems and play models. However, 3D seismic reflection data provide an opportunity to directly map the three-dimensional distribution of key petroleum system elements, thereby supplementing typically sparse, one-dimensional sedimentary [...]
The relationships between regional Quaternary uplift, deformation across active normal faults and historical seismicity in the upper plate of subduction zones: The Capo D’Orlando Fault, NE Sicily.
Published: 2018-04-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In order to investigate deformation within the upper plate of the Calabrian subduction zone we have mapped and modelled a sequence of Late Quaternary palaeoshorelines tectonically‐deformed by the Capo D’Orlando normal fault, NE Sicily, which forms part of the actively deforming Calabrian Arc. In addition to the 1908 Messina Strait earthquake (Mw 7.1), this region has experienced damaging [...]
The seismic history of the Pisia fault (eastern Corinth rift, Greece) from fault plane weathering features and cosmogenic 36Cl dating
Published: 2018-04-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure
The deformation of the eastern Corinth rift (Greece) is distributed along several E-W trending active normal faults. Here, the 25-km-long Pisia fault experienced up to 150 cm of coseismic displacement during the 1981 Alkyonides earthquake sequence (M = 6.7, 6.4, 6.3). Using terrestrial laser scanning, coupled with analyses of color changes, lichen colonization and karstic features, we identify [...]
River deltas as Multiplex networks: A framework for studying multi-process multi-scale connectivity via coupled-network theory
Published: 2018-04-13
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Dynamic Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Mathematics, Non-linear Dynamics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics, Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics
Transport of water, nutrients or energy fluxes in many natural or coupled human-natural systems occurs along different pathways that often have a wide range of transport timescales and might exchange fluxes with each other dynamically (e.g., surface-subsurface). Understanding this type of transport is key to predicting how landscapes will change under changing forcing. Here, we present a general [...]
Kinematics of the active West Andean fold-and-thrust belt (Central Chile): structure and long-term shortening rate
Published: 2018-03-19
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure
West-verging thrusts, synthetic with the Nazca - South America subduction interface, have been recently discovered at the western front of the Andes. At ~33°30’S, the active San Ramón fault stands as the most frontal of these west-verging structures, and represents a major earthquake threat for Santiago, capital city of Chile. Here we elaborate a detailed 3D structural map and a precise [...]
A potential link between waterfall recession rate and bedrock channel concavity
Published: 2018-03-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The incision of bedrock channels is typically modeled through the stream power or the shear stress applied on the channel bed. However, this approach is not valid for quasi-vertical knickpoints (hereafter waterfalls), where water and sediments do not apply direct force on the vertical face and waterfall retreat rate is often modeled as a power function of drainage area. These different incision [...]