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Erosion during mountain building: Insights from the southern Central Andes


April 5, 2017, noon - 1 p.m.
Geology 1810

Presented By:
Petro Val
UCSD

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Erosion during mountain building: Insights from the southern Central Andes

The temporal evolution of erosion over million-year timescales is key to understand the development of mountain ranges and adjacent fold-and-thrust belts. Models of orogenic wedge dynamics predict an instantaneous response of erosion to pulses of rock uplift while stream-power based models predict that catchment-wide erosion maxima lag behind a pulse of rock uplift. Other models, empirical data, and global compilations of exhumation data demonstrate the dependency of denudation and rock exhumation rate on climate. However, site-specific studies suggest that these relationships can be diminished by tectonics. This talk will contain two case-studies from the southern Central Andes, one involving a temporal record of 10Be-derived paleoerosion rates from 8-3 Ma and another constraining the along-strike erosion rate pattern using 10Be and gauge data from both flanks of the Andes (Argentina and Chile). These case-studies support that the attainment of peak erosion rates is lagged with respect to the rock uplift pulse and that modern erosion rates are better explained by tectonics.