Journal
EARTH AND PLANETARY SCIENCE LETTERS
Volume 398, Issue -, Pages 77-89Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2014.04.045
Keywords
cosmogenic nuclides; basin-wide erosion rates; Tibetan Plateau; Kunlun Shan; landscape evolution
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation of China [41328001, 41171001, 40971013]
- Swedish Research Council [348-2007-6924]
- Division Of Earth Sciences
- Directorate For Geosciences [1153689] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Quantifying long-term erosion rates across the Tibetan Plateau and its bordering mountains is of critical importance to an understanding of the interaction between climate, tectonic movement, and landscape evolution. We present a new dataset of basin-wide erosion rates from the central and northern Tibetan Plateau derived using in-situ produced Be-10 concentrations of river sediments. Basin-wide erosion rates from the central plateau range from 10.1 +/- 0.9 to 36.8 +/- 3.2 mm/kyr, slightly higher than published local erosion rates measured from bedrock surfaces. These values indicate that long-term downwearing of plateau surfaces proceeds at low rates and that the landscape is demonstrably stable in the central plateau. In contrast, basin-wide erosion rates from the Kunlun Shan on the northern Tibetan Plateau range from 19.9 +/- 1.7 to 163.2 +/- 15.9 mm/kyr. Although the erosion rates of many of these basins are much higher than the rates from the central plateau, they are lower than published basin-wide erosion rates from other mountains fringing the Tibetan Plateau, probably because the basins in the Kunlun Shan include both areas of low-relief plateau surface and high-relief mountain catchments and may also result from retarded fluvial sediment transport in an arid climate. Significantly higher basin-wide erosion rates derived from the Tibetan Plateau margin, compared to the central plateau, reflect a relatively stable plateau surface that is being dissected at its margins by active fluvial erosion. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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