Lithology, landscape dissection and glaciation controls on catchment erosion as determined by cosmogenic nuclides in river sediment (the Wutach Gorge, Black Forest)
✍ Scribed by Philippe Morel; Friedhelm Von Blanckenburg; Mirjam Schaller; Peter W. Kubik; Matthias Hinderer
- Book ID
- 104463451
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2003
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 433 KB
- Volume
- 15
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0954-4879
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✦ Synopsis
Abstract
Cosmogenic nuclides, measured in quartz from recent river bedload, provide a novel tool to quantify catchment‐wide erosion rates at geologically meaningful time scales. Here we present an analysis of the geomorphological evolution of the 350 km^2^ Wutach catchment in the uplands of the south‐west German Black Forest. The robustness of the method is demonstrated by the fact that, although the area was affected by river capture at 18 kyr bp, the formed gorge is so narrow that spatially averaged erosion rates were not resolvably perturbed. However, because cosmogenic nuclides preserve an erosion memory of several thousand years, the only perturbation introduced was detected in the minor areas that have been subject to the last maximum glaciation. In unglaciated areas, an important relationship between lithology and erosion can by quantified: sandstone lithologies erode at 12–18 mm kyr^−1^, granite lithologies at 35–47 mm kyr^−1^ and limestone lithologies (as deduced from river load gauging) at 70–90 mm kyr^−1^.