Professor Andy Carter co-authors a Nature paper on impact of long-term climate change on erosion
Professor Carter and his international colleagues have published a paper which demonstrates important connections between climate change and erosion.
Professor Andy Carter, in cooperation with international colleagues, published a paper in Nature [Worldwide acceleration of mountain erosion under a cooling climate, 19 December 2013], revealing the impact of long-term climate change on mountain-range erosion.
The research behind the paper compiled 18,000 bedrock thermochronometric ages from around the world and applied a formal inversion procedure to estimate temporal and spatial variations in erosion rates. The authors were able to show that the increase in erosion rates appeared at all latitudes but was most pronounced in glaciated mountain ranges, showing that cooling during the Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs had a significant impact on erosion rates of mountain ranges. The results have important implications in general for improving our understanding of the coupling between climate and erosion.
Photo: Pronounced cooling of Earth's climate during the Pliocene to Pleistocene induced an increase in erosion rates in glaciated mountain ranges.
Professor Andy Carter’s research uses geochronology and thermochronometry to understand how continents deform and how surface topography develops over different spatial and temporal scales. This work has taken him to two mountainous terrains in North Vietnam and the northern margins of Tibet. Changes to the earth’s surface reflect the interplay between tectonics and climate. Understanding how they are connected is critical to explaining climate and ecological change past, present and future.