Latest Geomorphology Stories
Vegetation and sand found to be essential in stream lifeIn a feat of reverse-engineering, Christian Braudrick of University of California at Berkeley and three coauthors have successfully built and maintained a scale model of a living meandering gravel-bed river in the lab. Their findings point to the importance of vegetation to reinforce the banks and, surprisingly, to the importance of sand in healthy meandering river life.The significance of vegetation for slowing erosion and reinforcing...
Despite the great difficulties in quantifying all the environmental and human factors that affect sediment discharge by rivers into the sea, a group of Catalan scientists has compiled data to describe and evaluate the solid sediment discharge from nine river basins in Catalonia "“ the Ter, Foix, Gaia, Besós, Llobregat, FrancolÃ, Tordera, Muga, and Fluvia. "This was a slow job, with its fair share of difficulties", Miquel Canals, one of the authors of the study and a senior...
Sediments released by many of the world's largest river deltas to the global oceans have been changed drastically in the last 50 years, largely as a result of human activity, says a Texas A&M University researcher who emphasizes that the historical information that can be gathered from sediment cores collected in and around these large deltaic regions is critical for a better understanding of environmental changes in the 21st century.Thomas Bianchi, a professor in the Department of...
Global warming could result in massive droughts and flooding in Tibet, posing threats to the wellbeing of millions of people, according to the head of the China Meteorological Bureau.According to China's Xinhua news agency, Zheng Guoguang reported on Wednesday that climate change has "accelerated glacial shrinkage, and the melting glaciers have swollen Tibet's lakes.""If the warming continues, millions of people in western China will face floods in the short term and drought in the long...
The Yucca Mountain crest in Nevada, USA has been proposed as a permanent site for high level radioactive waste. But a new study, already published as an article in press by Elsevier's journal Geomorphology and recently included in the Research Highlights of Nature, shows that there may be erosion of the crest.Kurt Stüwe of the University of Graz, Austria, together with his colleagues, used a simple numerical landscape evolution model to explore the rate of erosional decay of the Yucca...
Climate change is now threatening France's Aquitaine coast, which stretches north from the Spanish border to the Gironde River, causing erosion that is endangering coastal communities. In 2006 the European LIFE program identified 13 coastal communities as hotspots for erosion."There is a lack of sand on the beaches, because of a period of warming -- climate change," says Cyril Mallet, of the French geology and mining research agency BRGM.Climate change means more erosion for the...
A U.S. study shows rivers in some of the world's most populous regions are losing water, with some losses attributed to climate change. The study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research suggests the reduced stream flow potentially threatens future supplies of food and water. The scientists, examining stream flow from 1948 to 2004, said they found significant downward changes in about one-third of the world's largest rivers, including the Yellow River in northern China, the Ganges in...
Climate change is resulting in massive drying of some of the world's biggest rivers, according to a report released on Tuesday.Researchers led by Aiguo Dai of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado found that rivers including the Yellow River in northern China, the Ganges in India, the Niger in West Africa, and the Colorado in the southwestern United States are in danger of losing water due to climate change."Reduced runoff is increasing the pressure on...
Researchers say coastal erosion along a 40-mile stretch of the Beaufort Sea in Alaska more than doubled to about 45 feet annually between 2002 and 2007. U.S. Geological Survey scientist Benjamin Jones, who led the study, said although the patterns documented in the research might represent a short-term episode of enhanced erosion, the findings might also represent the future pattern of coastline erosion in the Arctic. Jones and his colleagues said recent shifts in the rate and pattern of...
Pebbles that become part of clastic rocks in places like Arizona's Lower Antelope Canyon don't move with the wind but against it, a geosciences professor said. Rather than being pushed into formations, the pebbles, or clasts, have the loose sand around them removed by the wind, Andrew Leier of the University of Calgary said in the journal Geology. The sand removal causes scour-pits to form on the wind side of larger clasts, and the pebbles eventually fall toward the wind into the scours, he...
Latest Geomorphology Reference Libraries
Desert greening is made up of any number of methods used to revitalize deserts. So far, only arid and semi-arid desert are meant when using this expression. The icy deserts and other types are considered to be unsuitable. The different methods include landscaping methods to reduce evaporation, erosion, consolidation of topsoil, temperature, sandstorms and more, permaculture in general, planting trees, regeneration of salty, polluted, or degenerated soils, floodwater retention and...
Theodore Roosevelt National Park is located in western North Dakota in the United States. The park contains 70,446 acres of land that is separated into three distinct badland areas known as the Elkhorn Ranch Unit, the South Unit, and the North Unit. Roosevelt first visited the area in 1883, while hunting for bison, and is said to have “fallen in love” with the badlands. After investing a large sum of money into the Maltese Cross Ranch, Roosevelt had his own cabin built, which he later...
Badlands national Park is located in the southwest region of South Dakota. It holds 242,756 acres of land, with 64,144 acres comprising a protected wilderness area. The park was designated as a national monument in 1929 and established in 1939, but attained national park status in 1978. The Stronghold Unit area of the park is managed by the National Park Service and the Oglala Lakota tribe and holds many sights including those used for Ghost Dances in the 1890’s, a bomb and gunnery range...
A drainage divide, water divide, divide, or watershed is the line that separates neighboring drainage basins. In flat country the divide may be invisible (just a notional line on the ground either side of which water starts its journey to different waterways). While, in hilly country, the divide lies along peaks and ridges. Drainage divides are important geographical, and sometimes political boundaries. Roads and railways often follow divides to minimize slopes and marshes and rivers....
