ESPM - Earth Surface Processes at Manchester - Geomorphology Blog

Peer review

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Rowan) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 10:25:00 +0000

Running the peer review gauntlet (from GenomicEnterprise.com)

Several recent articles from different sources have addressed how to write a good review of a research article, and many start with the assumption that few PhD students are given any training at all in how to approach peer-reviewing. Not the case for ESPM students however, as we have been learning how to helpfully review each others' manuscripts, and also picking up everyones' favourite buzzwords along the way (is four uses of 'elucidate' in one ms too many?!).

Two useful places to start are Drubin (2011) 'Any jackass can trash a manuscript, but it takes a good scholar to create one' and Nicholas and Gordon (2011) 'A quick guide to writing a solid peer review'. Further ideas, and reasoning for why to do the review anyway comes from the always informative Nature Careers section, with Gewin (2011) 'Rookie Review' interviews a postdoc who wins awards for his reviews.

Other useful articles in related areas, are:

Annesley (2011) 'Top 10 tips for responding to reviewer and editor comments' for when the tables are turned and you need to remember to be polite to the person who didn't read Drubin (2011) before reviewing your beautifully crafted ms.
Mullins and Kiley (2002) 'It's a PhD not the Nobel Prize: How experienced examiners assess research theses' that you hope will be read by your examiners before you meet them for a viva, and might even be useful in deciding who they should be!
Roebber and Schultz (2011) 'Peer review, program officers and science funding' which uses game theory to investigate the Scientist's Dilemma - how many grant applications do you need to send off before one gets funded, and how do economic conditions and the reviewers' state of mind affect your chance of success?

Occasional geomorphic educational toy#1: PhET interactive glacier

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Rowan) — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 19:35:00 +0000

The PhET Glacier Simulation

Click to Run

An interactive glacier simulation tool as part of a series of online, research-based science simulations from PhET at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The glacier model allows you to investigate the effect of changing climate on glacier dynamics, and "Adjust mountain snowfall and temperature to see the glacier grow and shrink. Use scientific tools to measure thickness, velocity and glacial budget", it even makes terminal moraines when it retreats - hours of fun! The "scientific tools" may look a bit basic, but actually they make the sim more useful for understanding glacier processes, and this is meant to be high school level stuff (although preliminary research indicates that it keeps doctoral-level researchers happily occupied for quite some time...).

Also recommended, their 'John Travoltage' sim (if only he danced) for learning about static electricity at an undergraduate level, and a huge array of more useful physical concepts, all as Java downloads.

A hypertext for the appreciation of glaciers and how they work

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Rowan) — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 13:44:00 +0000

Glaciers and Glacial Geology is a useful website from students at Montana State University giving information about all aspects of the cryosphere, for complete beginners (Introductory section) and those of us who are just forgetful (Advanced section). Lots of illustrations, some hand drawn, and animations and even more enthusiasm. The reference list is missing, but then this is an undergraduate project...

St Beatus Caves field trip with Philipp Haeuselmann

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Brocklehurst) — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 15:29:00 +0000

The XVIII INQUA Congress mid-conference field trips also offered the opportunity to stay a little closer to Bern and learn about the erosional history of the Berner Oberland. Philipp Haeuselmann and Frank Preusser led a double-header to the Aareschlucht and St Beatus Caves.

The Aareschlucht is a spectacular gorge incised into a limestone riegel which transects the Aare valley east of Interlaken. The Aare is a sizeable river here, and enters the gorge beneath vertical cliffs 10-15m apart. The most incredible feature of the gorge, though, is the way the walls on both sides develop amazing overhangs; at one point the walkway above the river occupies the whole gap between the walls on either side. There's also some impressive Swiss engineering to have put in a walkway down the gorge at all...

The St Beatus Caves represent the easily-accessible part of a giant cave system used by Haeuselmann et al. (2007) to investigate the longer-term history of the region. Using cosmogenic isotope burial dating of cave sediments, Haeuselmann et al. discovered a 10-fold increase in incision rates in the Aare valley at the Mid-Pleistocene Transition. It was fantastic to see some of the caves involved in the study, the complex history of phreatic (under the water table) and vadose (above the water table) caves in the system, and the incredible volumes of water moving in subterranean rivers after heavy rainfall! Plus our short walk represented a tiny fraction of the entire, enormous cave network.

Aletsch Glacier field trip with Meredith Kelly

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Rowan) — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:33:00 +0000

View of the Great Aletsch Glacier from Chalchofu (2051 m), with the Eiger in the background

The INQUA mid-conference field trips offered plenty of choice of beautiful Alpine scenery to visit, but Meredith Kelly's trip to the Aletsch Glacier, via a very cold Grimsel Pass, has to have been one of the best trips! After a brief stop at Grimsel Pass, where, as promised, horizontal snow and cold winds made most participants regret not bringing more fleeces, we drove through the Rhone Valley to get a cable car up for a hike along the left lateral Esesen moraine. The upper Rhone Valley supported the highest ice domes of the LGM Alpine ice cap, and Meredith showed us sites where she had taken samples for cosmogenic nuclide exposure age dating to determine the LGM extent and retreat rate of the glacier, published in Kelly et al. (2004a). The glaciers in this region have flowed over tough gneissic basement rock, so that the LGM trimlines at ~2700–2800 m above sea level (Kelly et al., 2004b) are clearly visible on the valley sides, with the terrace of the Hotel Reiderfurka conveniently located for a leisurely viewing of these features over a few local beers.

OSL 101 in five seconds

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Rowan) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 17:28:00 +0000

Click on the image above to view a larger version

Geomorphologists! Still confused by what OSL is actually measuring? Still think it is a weird black-box technique? While I can't offer much reassurance on the latter question, recommended reading to help answer this is Georgina King's excellent paper in Radiation Measurements from January. For the former, maybe this animation will help!

Separating climate signals from tectonic forcing as a control on stratigraphy

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Rowan) — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 19:23:00 +0000

A paper in this week's Nature Geoscience by John Armitage et al. from Imperial College, investigates the different effects of climate and tectonic forcing on the transient grain size distribution of geomorphic systems, and the effect this has on stratigraphy. They explore the complexities in understanding the sedimentary record as an archive of climate change and tectonic events through a numerical model, including downstream changes in grain size distribution as a key control. Their results show, for example, that a doubling of precipitation rate in the catchment of an alluvial fan causes a sharp increase in sediment flux over a 0.5 Myr period, that doubles the length of the fan. The model produces beautiful cross-sections showing where particular grain sizes occur in an alluvial fan following different types of forcing, to understand the duration of stratigraphic responses and compare this to field examples. The authors even helpfully include the equations used in their model to try at home!

Success of ESPM students at conference

noreply@blogger.com (Rajasmita Goswami) — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 15:56:00 +0000

ESPM ended last year with a winning spirit. The School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Science Postgraduate Conference was held on 9 December, 2010. Our ESPM students participated in the poster session and won the following prizes:

1^st prize: Rajasmita Goswami for her poster titled, “Linking onshore and offshore erosion and sediment transport in the Strait of Messina, Italy.”

2^nd prize: Ann Rowan for her poster titled, “Numerical modelling of climatically-driven drainage capture and sediment flux, South Island, New Zealand.”

4^th prize: Oliver Duffy for his poster titled, “Landscape Response to Active Extensional Faulting and Multiple Local Base Levels: The Perachora Peninsula, Eastern Gulf of Corinth, Greece.”

AGU10 Robert P. Sharp lecture - Doug Jerolmack

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Rowan) — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:13:00 +0000

Click the image to link to the video of the lecture

One of the highlights of the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco on 17th December this year was the inaugural Robert P. Sharp lecture, given by Doug Jerolmack from the University of Pennsylvania. The Earth and Planetary Surface Processes section gave two new awards this year, Bill Dietrich being the other awardee. Doug gave a very entertaining talk titled "Noise is the new signal: Moving beyond zeroth-order geomorphology".

Doug's lecture aimed to 'celebrate variability' in every aspect of geomorphology, rather than just averaging it out to look for a primary signal. He discussed the importance of timescale in measuring rates of surface processes, and how what we call a transient feature of a landscape changes its behaviour depending on the timescale over which we observe it. This can even be seen in totally uniform grains, as sediment transport will alter the organisation of their bed structures and so change the threshold for entrainment, as seen in work by Charru et al., (2004). We had a whistle-stop tour of the behaviour of rice grains flowing downslope, avulsion timescales, how the inactive proportion of an alluvial fan decays with a harmonic function over time (Cazanacli et al., 2002) and finished up with the noise-induced stability of turbulence. All in, a great round-up of the state of play in studies of sediment transport, and the future of geomorphology. The video is available at the AGU website for those who missed it.

ESPM at AGU

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Brocklehurst) — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 16:34:00 +0000

It's that time of year again! The Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, 13th-17th December, will feature 7 presentations involving ESPM members. Needless to say we are all rather busy...

In no particular order (to view abstracts, first click on the "Search Fall Meeting Program" link on this page, then the links should become active):

Identifying climate change signals in the late Quaternary gravel-bed, braided river stratigraphy of the Canterbury Plains, New Zealand. M. A. Jones; A. V. Rowan; S. J. Covey-Crump; S. H. Brocklehurst; H. M. Roberts; G. A. Duller. abstract presenter

Tectonic signals in glaciated landscapes: the importance of scale (Invited). S. H. Brocklehurst. abstract presenter

Linking onshore and offshore erosion and sediment transport in the Strait of Messina, Italy. R. Goswami; N. C. Mitchell; S. H. Brocklehurst; A. Argnani. abstract presenter

Numerical modelling of climatically-driven drainage capture and sediment flux, South Island, New Zealand. A. V. Rowan; M. A. Plummer; S. H. Brocklehurst; M. A. Jones. abstract presenter

The role of antecedent drainage networks and isolated normal fault propagation on basin stratigraphy. E. Finch; S. H. Brocklehurst; R. Gawthorpe. abstract presenter

The influence of interacting normal faults on drainage network evolution and basin stratigraphy. S. H. Brocklehurst; E. Finch; R. Gawthorpe. abstract presenter

Landscape Response to Active Extensional Faulting and Multiple Local Base Levels: The Perachora Peninsula, Eastern Gulf of Corinth, Greece. O. Bujanowski-Duffy; S. H. Brocklehurst; R. L. Gawthorpe; E. Finch. abstract presenter

Why Waiho?

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Rowan) — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 13:14:00 +0000

Waiho Loop moraine, South Island, New Zealand [From teara.govt.nz]

A little background ahead of our discussion of New Zealand's climate tomorrow. Many discussions of this subject come down to the Waiho Loop, a spectacular moraine ridge formed by the equally famous Franz Josef glacier on the western side of the Southern Alps - in the picture above its the dark green thing that looks like a moustache. Various dating campaigns have placed the age of the Loop at ~13 ka, and the original C14 ages agree closely with C14 ages for Younger Dryas (YD) moraines in the Northern Hemisphere. These were checked in 2007 due to the high variability in dates from Waiho Loop carbon, and placed slightly earlier, at the end of the Antarctic Cold Reversal (ACR). It has also been argued that the Loop is not a climate signal, and formed independently of cooling, with the glacier advancing due to rock fall onto its surface, although modelling would suggest otherwise.

As several recent and not-so-recent papers have pointed out, there is plenty of evidence for a climate origin of the Waiho Loop, so it's age needs to be incorporated into any interpretation of ACR/YD climate. Problems with the C14 age, from both contamination with younger carbon making ages too old to degradation of the dated material making ages too young have been debated. The C14 age also does not fit with marine core and pollen data, although the reliability of these has been questioned. The Waiho Loop is classically attributed to the YD, and so cited as evidence of synchronous inter-hemispheric climate change, but more recent studies suggest it is older, indicating an ACR advance in New Zealand, and so a wide-ranging Southern Hemisphere cooling event.

Putnam et al (2010)'s recent study of the Pukaki glaciers confirms that eastern South Island glaciers advanced during the ACR then rapidly retreated when the YD started. This is corroborated by Kaplan et al. (2010)'s study at Irishman's Stream, and they attribute the Waiho Loop to the ACR rather than the YD. They imply asynchronous global climate change, potentially due to migration of major wind systems at this time. So is the date of the Waiho Loop correct, and if so, how should it be interpreted in context of other glacial records from New Zealand and climate teleconnections?

NZ-YD#2: Maybe the Waiho Loop is a climate signal

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Rowan) — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 09:08:00 +0000

Kaplan et al., (2010), Figure 2. Central Southern Alps about 13 000 yr ago

Michael Kaplan is back in the New Zealand Younger Dryas debate this week, as coauthor with Aaron Putnam et al. in Nature Geoscience. This investigation of the Birch Hill moraine, again using 10Be cosmogenic dates, shows that the Antarctic Cold Reversal (ACR) did cause glacial advance in the Pukaki catchment at 12.97 ka and a similar expansion of the nearby Macaulay glacier, so the ACR is likely to have been a Southern Hemisphere-wide cooling event. This provides further weight to the bipolar seesaw hypothesis; simply that one hemisphere cools whilst the other warms. These results also correspond to a climatic driver for the Franz Josef glacier advancing to form the Waiho Loop moraine, rather than the landslide origin proposed by Tovar et al., (2008) amongst others, as evidence against a Younger Dryas in New Zealand. A climate origin for this moraine would indicate ACR cooling in New Zealand that occurred asynchronously to the Northern Hemisphere YD. So was New Zealand warm or cold between 13-11 ka? An ongoing discussion...

Occasional YouTube video #7 - Debris flow with car-sized clasts

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Brocklehurst) — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 21:15:00 +0000

Speaks for itself... (action starts around 1:09)

As posted on Dave's Landslide Blog, where it was suggested by Ivan Montanari. Atrani lies in a reasonably precarious position on the Amalfi coast in Italy.

NZ-YD#1: No evidence for a Southern Hemisphere Younger Dryas?

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Rowan) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 16:37:00 +0000

Irishman's Stream, New Zealand

The presence of a Younger Dryas (YD, ~13-12 ka) cooling event in New Zealand has been much discussed as it would provide a useful correlation to the Northern Hemisphere cooling at this time, and so indicate if glacial-interglacial cycles in either hemisphere occur synchronously or sequentially. South Island's Waiho Loop moraine was previously considered to represent the YD, but recent research by Tovar et al. at Canterbury University revealed its landslide origin. A paper in Nature this week by Kaplan et al. has shown from an investigation of glacial events in Irishman's Stream, using very high resolution 10Be dating, that this glacier retreated consistently throughout the period of the YD. This suggests that during a Northern Hemisphere glacial the Southern Hemisphere is warming, which may be due to a southward shift in warm climate systems, or a more extreme seasonality between the poles during cooling. In fact, our understanding of the climate of this area is changing rapidly; Shulmeister et al. extend the start of the Last Glacial Maximum in New Zealand by 2 kyr to ~24 ka, again using cosmogenic dating.

Do glaciers reset the luminescence signal of the sediment at their base?

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Rowan) — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 10:44:00 +0000

Haut Glacier d'Arolla, Switzerland

Lots of interesting discussions at last week's UK TL/OSL/ESR conference at Oxford University, but of particular interest to geomorphologists was Mark Bateman's talk 'Do glaciers reset their beds?'. Mark told us about the work that he and Darrel Swift are doing at Sheffield to investigate the effect of subglacial transport on the luminescence signal of basal sediments, which is about to be published in Boreas. Darrel drilled a core through the Haut Glacier d'Arolla, Switzerland to collect sediment from its base for initial luminescence measurements. Then they moved the lab, using a ring-shear 'donut' machine to recreate subglacial stresses on quartz sand with substantial known luminescence characteristics.This indicated that increased strain increases the number of zero dose grains and reduces the overall paleodose of the sediment. So yes, it would appear that glaciers do reset their beds, raising the possibility of using luminescence to date glacial retreat stages and sediment transport to a high resolution.

Tectonic Geomorphology - L'Aquila

noreply@blogger.com (Oliver Bujanowski-Duffy) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 08:58:00 +0000

On the 6th April 2009, a 5.9 magnitude earthquake hit the Abruzzo region of Central Italy, killing over 300 people. The area lies within the Central Apennines and is undergoing extension along NW-SE trending faults in relation to back-arc extension in the Tyrrehenian Sea and Afro-Eurasia collision.
Geologists claim to have predicted the 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila one month prior to the event, using evidence from Radon emission patterns. However, these views were seen as overly 'alarmist' by the Italian director of Civil Defence. Since the earthquake, and to much furore, Italian geologists and officials have been indicted for manslaughter for not predicting the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake. This step has caused disillusionment amongst many reknowned structural geologists and seismologists who understand the difficulty in predicting the precise location (and more importantly, timing) of earthquake events.

Have a fly around on google earth and have a look at the tectonic geomorphology of the region. Note the bell-shaped displacement profiles of the major fault segments, the relay zones and the major backtilted fault blocks. How do you think the soft lake sediments on which the city is built influenced the severity of the earthquake? Why was the city built in this location in the first place? Which areas would you think are at risk of rupture based on the current landscape? How has the drainage interacted with the fault segments?

Bedrock channel erosion in the lab

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Brocklehurst) — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:22:00 +0000

Joel Johnson and Kelin Whipple have just had another interesting article on bedrock channel erosion published. Here they circumvent the usual problem of the unmanageable timescales of laboratory erosion experiments by employing a "bedrock" made of weak concrete. The principle aim of the study is to examine the role of sediment in bedrock erosion, both as a tool for erosion, and as a protective blanket on the channel bed. They found a linear increase of erosion rate with sediment flux, and a linear decrease of erosion rate with alluvial bed cover, while also highlighting the importance of local bed topography on bed cover. Important results from an elegant experimental set-up!

Here are some previous publications from the pair, an informed combination of careful laboratory and field studies.

Johnson J P and K X Whipple (2007). Feedbacks between erosion and sediment transport in experimental bedrock channels. Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, 32 (7), p. 1048-1062, DOI: 10.1002/esp.1471.

Johnson, J. P. L., K. X. Whipple, L. S. Sklar, and T. C. Hanks (2009), Transport slopes, sediment cover, and bedrock channel incision in the Henry Mountains, Utah. J. Geophys. Res., 114, F02014, doi:10.1029/2007JF000862.

Johnson, J. P. L., K. X. Whipple, and L. S. Sklar (2010), Contrasting bedrock incision rates from snowmelt and flash floods in the Henry Mountains, Utah. GSA Bulletin, 122 (9-10), p. 1600-1615.

Even the geomorphology is bigger (faster) in Texas!

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Brocklehurst) — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:12:00 +0000

View Larger Map

This week in Nature Geoscience, Michael Lamb and Mark Fonstad report the incision of Canyon Lake Gorge, Texas, during a single dam-release flood event in 2002. This well-constrained flood event moved metre-sized boulders, excavated ~7 m of limestone and transformed a soil-mantled valley into a bedrock canyon in only ~3 days! Not quite a natural flood event, but quite spectacular and informative all the same. View Canyon Lake in Google Earth here.

Martian geomorphology (and geology) update

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Brocklehurst) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 14:55:00 +0000

The 1^st June issue of Earth and Planetary Science Letters is a special volume devoted to the Mars Express mission, and recent progress on our geological and geomorphological understanding of the Martian surface. The 28 articles include many specifically about geomorphology, including:

- Jaumann et al. describe multiple erosional events across 2.8 billion years, driven by very intermittent flow from multiple water sources, in the The Western Libya Montes Valley System

- Erkeling et al. report a similarly multi-genetic evolution of valley networks in the eastern Libya Montes, formed by a combination of surface runoff and groundwater-induced processes over ~800 million years

- Head et al. discuss evidence for debris-covered glaciers operating in the Late Amazonian period

- Dickson et al. take a detailed look at crater morphology at the Phlegra Montes (specifically overtopping by ice) to reveal occupation by ice 1 km thick in the Late Amazonian

- Kneissl et al. describe a detailed analysis of the distribution and orientation of gullies on the Martian surface, which revealed that formation mechanisms based on atmospheric water-ice deposition are more likely than processes related to groundwater flow

- Levy et al. contribute to the ongoing debate over the origin of gullies on Mars - dry granular flows and landslides, wet debris flows, or fluvial erosion and alluvial deposition? Their detailed morphological analysis of lobate structures in Protonilus Mensae indicates these at least were formed by wet debris flows

- Kleinhans et al. detail a simple numerical model for alluvial fan and delta development that indicates that features seen on Mars result from single flow events lasting days to years.

"Tectonics and geomorphology" review article published

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Brocklehurst) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 10:30:00 +0000

Simon's review paper, "Tectonics and geomorphology", has just been published in Progress in Physical Geography. The review attempts to summarise the status of fluvial, hillslope, glacial and submarine geomorphology in relation to active tectonics (at the time of writing). This means both attempts to use geomorphology to infer something about the tectonics, and exploiting active tectonics settings to further our understanding of geomorphological processes. The article is part of a special volume of Progress in Physical Geography on the future of geomorphology, which also contains a number of other interesting articles.

Please email Simon if you are unable to access the article.

Weathering, erosion rates, and late Cenozoic cooling

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Brocklehurst) — Sat, 15 May 2010 14:56:00 +0000

Raymo and Ruddiman (1992) advocated mountain building as a driver of climate change. Molnar and England (1990) pointed to the ambiguities of the sedimentary record (increased sediment flux could be triggered by uplift or climate change) and suggested that erosion in response to climate change could drive peak uplift. In Nature this week, Willenbring and von Blanckenburg present a new contribution to the debate on the relationship between climate (specifically late Cenozoic cooling), weathering, erosion and atmospheric CO₂ . They use the marine ¹⁰Be/⁹Be isotope system as a proxy for global weathering rates, and infer steady erosion rates for the last ~12 Myr. Hence, according to their evidence, weathering is not responsible for global cooling, but neither does global cooling trigger enhanced erosion.

Which DEM are you using?

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Brocklehurst) — Fri, 07 May 2010 09:54:00 +0000

Jonathan de Ferranti maintains Viewfinder Panoramas, which features some interesting discussion of DEM quality issues and virtual globes, as well as his own DEMs for download, and information on other sources of topographic data. Well worth reading, and especially viewing his visual comparisons of how well different datasets (including GoogleEarth) capture some well-known mountains. The image above shows (or rather, doesn't show) Everest as rendered by one of the popular virtual globes...

Useful graph digitising software

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Rowan) — Mon, 03 May 2010 16:23:00 +0000

DigitizeIt is useful for those times when someone gives you a print out of a graph, you want to compare data from a published plot to your own or you work for an oil company and your data is from the 70s. This is much quicker and easier than reading off values and plotting them yourself, just define the axes and get clicking, then copy data out or make an ascii. It's shareware, not freeware, so the licence is £44.

Modelling glacial mass balance

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Rowan) — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 15:02:00 +0000

Lots of talk about glacial modelling this week after Roger Braithwaite's talk, which included New Zealand as the place with the highest glacial fluxes and mass balance sensitivity in the IPCC reports. A particular favourite at the moment is the recent Anderson et al., (2010) paper looking at the response of the Brewster Glacier to climate change. Their results show the huge sensitivity of New Zealand's glaciers to even a small rise in temperature, which has significant implications for global sea level.

Occasional YouTube video #6 - Eyjafjallajökull jökulhlaup

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Brocklehurst) — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 18:16:00 +0000

Just a reminder that ash clouds aren't the only consequences of Icelandic eruptions...