Geomorphology articles within Nature Communications

Featured

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study analyzes the 3d shapes of landslides and introduces a method to discern landslide movements, such as slides, flows and falls.

    • Kushanav Bhuyan
    • , Kamal Rana
    •  & Nishant Malik
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Riparian vegetation densities critically mediate the morphodynamics of meandering rivers: plants slow the rate at which channels move laterally and reinforce the key, first-order control that curvature exerts on meander planform evolution.

    • Alvise Finotello
    • , Alessandro Ielpi
    •  & Andrea D’Alpaos
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using a lake sediment core taken from the European Alps and combining a source-sink approach with isotope geochemistry, it has been established that the effects of human activities have outweighed those of climate on erosion for more than 3800 years.

    • William Rapuc
    • , Charline Giguet-Covex
    •  & Fabien Arnaud
  • Article
    | Open Access

    14% of the world’s coastlines are muddy and the majority of them are eroding at rates exceeding 1 m per year over the last three decades, according to an automated classification method that identifies global coastlines.

    • Romy Hulskamp
    • , Arjen Luijendijk
    •  & Stefan Aarninkhof
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Channel networks are key to coastal wetland functioning. Here, the authors show how vegetation enhances network branching, and hypothesize that this may enhance the storm surge buffering capacity of wetlands and their resilience under sea-level rise.

    • Roeland C. van de Vijsel
    • , Jim van Belzen
    •  & Johan van de Koppel
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Barrier islands and backbarrier saltmarshes are particularly threatened by sea level rise. Here, the authors show how reduction in intertidal areas create negative feedback, shifting transport of coarse sediment through the inlet from net export to net import.

    • Kevin C. Hanegan
    • , Duncan M. FitzGerald
    •  & Zoe J. Hughes
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using satellite and survey data, an ancient river landscape 300 km wide has been discovered buried and preserved beneath the ice in East Antarctica. It has likely survived largely intact for up to 34 million years since before ice sheet growth.

    • Stewart S. R. Jamieson
    • , Neil Ross
    •  & Martin J. Siegert
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Accelerating global warming is driving profound Arctic environmental change. The authors show that the structure and evolution of new stream networks are influenced by the evolving character of geometric ground patterns related to the response of permafrost to recent climate change.

    • Shawn M. Chartrand
    • , A. Mark Jellinek
    •  & Shannon Hibbard
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dunes and woody-debris preserved in the rock record have been used to quantify the magnitude and duration of flow events in ancient rivers, revealing a fluvial system dominated by flashy, storm-driven floods 300 million years ago.

    • Jonah S. McLeod
    • , James Wood
    •  & Alexander C. Whittaker
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Changes in climate preconditioned large-scale, recurrent Miocene to Pleistocene Antarctic submarine landslides through variations in biological productivity, ice proximity and ocean circulation, posing tsunami risk to Southern Hemisphere populations.

    • Jenny A. Gales
    • , Robert M. McKay
    •  & Zhifang Xiong
  • Article
    | Open Access

    How much rain does it take to trigger a landslide? This work shows that deep learning can identify the driving forces that can cause rainfall induced landslides, opening up the possibility of forecasting landslide events over large areas

    • Alessandro C. Mondini
    • , Fausto Guzzetti
    •  & Massimo Melillo
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here the authors present a global scale classification of river channel belt extents as a resource for improved ecosystem accounting and river behavior analysis. Moreover, the methods show advances in pattern recognition to define new global landform products.

    • Björn Nyberg
    • , Gijs Henstra
    •  & Juha Ahokas
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Transitions from bare tidal flats to vegetated marshes are an example of shift between alternative stable ecosystem states. Here, the authors use remote sensing and modelling to quantify three stages in tidal flat evolution and identify early warning signals.

    • Gregory S. Fivash
    • , Stijn Temmerman
    •  & Tjeerd J. Bouma
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The contribution of animal ecosystem engineers to coastal geomorphological processes is often neglected. Here, the authors combine observational, experimental and modelling work to demonstrate that ecosystem engineering by mussels is a much stronger driver of salt marsh accretion rates than expected.

    • Sinéad M. Crotty
    • , Daniele Pinton
    •  & Christine Angelini
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fisher et al. combine sediment geochemistry and climate modelling to reveal long-term synchrony between erosion rates and orbitally-driven climate oscillations in the tectonically-active southern Central Andes.

    • G. Burch Fisher
    • , Lisa V. Luna
    •  & Lucas J. Lourens
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Emissions from local steps dominate the CO2 evasion of mountain river networks, owing to the pronounced turbulence in correspondence of each plunging jet and the low spacing between steps typical of high energy streams.

    • Gianluca Botter
    • , Anna Carozzani
    •  & Nicola Durighetto
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Results forecast that cliff retreat rates will increase by up to an order of magnitude by 2100 according to current predictions of sea-level rise, and reveal that even historically stable rock coasts are highly sensitive to sea-level rise.

    • Jennifer R. Shadrick
    • , Dylan H. Rood
    •  & Klaus M. Wilcken
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Bedrock weathering is associated with landslides, and also manifests as a change in the strength of subsurface materials. This study analyzes inventoried landslides to explore relationships between strength and landslide depth as a potential reflection of subsurface weathering at large scales.

    • Stefano Alberti
    • , Ben Leshchinsky
    •  & Michael J. Olsen
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Modeling cosmogenic nuclides concentrations from Kalahari Desert Sand reveals the time of sand introduction into the landscape. This coincides with morphotectonic and climatic changes that could have triggered sand production and its impact on the environment.

    • Shlomy Vainer
    • , Ari Matmon
    •  & Karim Keddadouche
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Testing feedbacks between climatic and geological processes are challenging. Here, the authors show that geomorphological features of the southern Red Sea margin are best interpreted by a feedback cycle between orographic precipitation, mid-ocean spreading and coastal magmatism, and that the feedback is enhanced by the trade wind.

    • Kurt Stüwe
    • , Jörg Robl
    •  & Finlay M. Stuart
  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study found that millennial periods of higher rainfall combined with rising sea level enhanced sediment accumulation in Amazonian rivers valleys. This fuelled synchronous expansion of vegetation adapted to seasonally flooded substrates and its specialized bird populations, showing how global climate changes can affect specific Amazonian species.

    • A. O. Sawakuchi
    • , E. D. Schultz
    •  & C. C. Ribas
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Wetland vegetation is typically considered only in terms of enhancing sediment accretion and positively impacting land-building. Here, the authors show that the degree of enhancement has a strong dependence on vegetation density through the influence on sediment supply and retention.

    • Yuan Xu
    • , Christopher R. Esposito
    •  & Heidi M. Nepf
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Earth’s largest dune fields are set to become less dynamic on average over this century due to anthropogenic climate change, with no future action able to mitigate this effect, as predicted by the newest iteration of CMIP models.

    • Andrew Gunn
    • , Amy East
    •  & Douglas J. Jerolmack
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cryptic faults concern earthquake scientists, since they pose a hidden seismic potential which is hard to identify. To address this, the authors here study off-fault deformed geomorphic markers such as marine terraces using high-resolution LiDAR topography, optical dating of sediments and space geodetic observations.

    • J. Jara-Muñoz
    • , D. Melnick
    •  & M. R. Strecker
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Giant dunes—stunning landforms that grow in patterns as wind blows sand grains over thousands of years—are measured across the entire planet for the first time. With this data, it’s shown the dunes can, in principle, grow in scale indefinitely.

    • Andrew Gunn
    • , Giampietro Casasanta
    •  & Douglas J. Jerolmack
  • Article
    | Open Access

    A comparison of salt marsh and mangrove channel networks around the world exhibited different network extents. This could be linked to differences in vegetation colonization strategies, with major implications on coastal development.

    • Christian Schwarz
    • , Floris van Rees
    •  & Barend van Maanen
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dunes may form on Jupiter’s moon Io. Despite a tenuous atmosphere, interactions between widespread lava and sulfur dioxide frost may produce vapor flows dense enough to mobilize sand grains. Ridge-like features may be evidence of this phenomenon.

    • George D. McDonald
    • , Joshua Méndez Harper
    •  & Laura Kerber
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Giant icy volcanos (cryovolcanos) on Pluto are unique in the imaged solar system and provide evidence for unexpected, active geology late in Pluto’s history.

    • Kelsi N. Singer
    • , Oliver L. White
    •  & Kimberly Ennico-Smith
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Megaripples are sand landforms found in wind-blown environments. A newly identified characteristic signature of the underlying bimodal sand transport process is found in the grain-size distribution on megaripples and could lend insight into transport conditions on Earth and other planetary bodies.

    • Katharina Tholen
    • , Thomas Pähtz
    •  & Klaus Kroy
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The threat posed by erosive-landslides is directly linked to their mobility. Here, the authors propose a mechanical model for the energy budget of erosive-landslides that controls their enhanced or reduced mobility.

    • Shiva P. Pudasaini
    •  & Michael Krautblatter
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Some regions on the Moon are permanently covered in shadow and are therefore extremely difficult to see into. We develop a deep learning driven algorithm which enhances images of these regions, allowing us to see inside them with high resolution for the first time.

    • V. T. Bickel
    • , B. Moseley
    •  & M. Shirley
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The relative role of individual forcing events in long-term landscape evolution is challenging to measure in the field. Badlands offer special opportunities to quantify common, natural landscape dynamics on observational time scales.

    • Ci-Jian Yang
    • , Jens M. Turowski
    •  & Kuo-Jen Chang
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The downhill motion of soils on hillslopes is not well understood. Here, the authors present laboratory experiments and show that hillslopes are made perpetually fragile by environmental perturbations that prevent them from stabilizing.

    • Nakul S. Deshpande
    • , David J. Furbish
    •  & Douglas J. Jerolmack
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The assessment of soil sustainability in prehistoric times requires comparing millennium-scale erosion rates with geological background rates. Here, the authors apply in situ cosmogenic 14C, 10Be, and 26Al to reveal rapid soil erosion on the Andean Altiplano in response to Late Holocene climate change and the onset of agropastoralism.

    • Kristina Hippe
    • , John D. Jansen
    •  & David Lundbek Egholm
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The configuration of past ice sheets, and therefore sea level, is highly uncertain. Here, the authors provide a global reconstruction of ice sheets for the past 80,000 years that allows to test proxy based sea level reconstructions and helps to reconcile disagreements with sea level changes inferred from models.

    • Evan J. Gowan
    • , Xu Zhang
    •  & Gerrit Lohmann
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Human activities have accelerated soil erosion and landscape change in many areas. Here the authors show how rates of erosion, sediment transfer and alluvial sedimentation have increased by an order of magnitude across North America since European colonization, far exceeding the rates expected of natural processes.

    • David B. Kemp
    • , Peter M. Sadler
    •  & Veerle Vanacker