Abstract
It is generally supposed that specific sediment yield—the quantity of sediment passing a monitored river cross-section per unit area drained upstream of that section—declines as the area drained increases1–3. Part of the sediment mobilized from the land surface is supposed to go back into storage at field edges, and on footslopes and floodplains. In contrast, we show here that data from British Columbian rivers reveal a pattern of increasing specific sediment yield at all spatial scales up to 3 × 104 km2. This results from the dominance of secondary remobilization of Quaternary sediments along river valleys over primary denudation of the land surface. The result controverts the conventional model which has been derived from studies of small, highly disturbed agricultural catch-ments. The rivers are still responding to the last glaciation, giving a landscape relaxation time greater than 10 kyr. This holds pro-found implications for geomorphological theory and for studies of erosion.
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Church, M., Slaymaker, O. Disequilibrium of Holocene sediment yield in glaciated British Columbia. Nature 337, 452–454 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1038/337452a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/337452a0
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