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Shrinking and splitting of drainage basins in orogenic landscapes from the migration of the main drainage divide

An Erratum to this article was published on 01 December 2009

This article has been updated

Abstract

Climate, and in particular the spatial pattern of precipitation, is thought to affect the topographic and tectonic evolution of mountain belts through erosion1,2,3,4,5. Numerical model simulations have suggested that the main drainage divide continuously migrates and asymmetric topography in mountain ranges develops in response to horizontal tectonic motion6 or orographic precipitation7,8. The effects of such a migration have, however, been challenging to observe in natural settings6. Here I document the effects of a lateral precipitation gradient on a landscape undergoing constant uplift in a laboratory modelling experiment. In the experiment, the drainage divide migrates towards the drier, leeward side of the mountain range, causing the drainage basins on the leeward side to shrink and split into smaller basins. This mechanism results in a progressively increasing number of drainage basins on the leeward side of the mountain range as the divide migrates, such that the expected relationship between the spacing of drainage basins and the location of the main drainage divide9 is maintained. I propose that this mechanism could clarify the drainage-divide migration and topographic asymmetry found in active orogenic mountain ranges, as seen in the Aconquija Range of Argentina10.

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Figure 1: Laboratory modelling of landscape dynamics under uniform uplift of the eroded material and lateral precipitation gradient.
Figure 2: Landscape response to main-drainage-divide (MDD) migration.
Figure 3: Detailed geomorphic evolution of a drainage basin.
Figure 4: Model of drainage-basin response to drainage-divide migration (see the text for comments).
Figure 5: Topography and drainage networks of the Sierra Aconquija, northwestern Argentina.

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Change history

  • 28 October 2009

    In the version of this Letter originally published, in the second sentence of the abstract 'symmetric' should have been 'asymmetric'. This error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the text.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank J.-J. Kermarrec for his technical assistance with the experiments and C. Andermann and M. Gaboriau for their help during the experimental runs. This work benefited from discussions with B. Bookhagen, P.R. Cobbold, I. Coutand, A. Crave, P. Davy, D. Gapais, D. Lague and S. Moyano. Special thanks to P. Davy for providing and constantly improving the GridVisual software. This work was funded by the Institut National des Sciences de l’Univers (INSU-CNRS) through the ‘Reliefs de la Terre’ research programme.

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Bonnet, S. Shrinking and splitting of drainage basins in orogenic landscapes from the migration of the main drainage divide. Nature Geosci 2, 766–771 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo666

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