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Geomorphology

Landscape texture set to scale

Nature volume 460, pages 468–469 (2009)Cite this article

Why, in many landscapes, does ridge–valley spacing show such regularity? The combination of high-resolution data and an elegant model offers a solution to this long-standing puzzle, for some cases at least.

For more than a century, geomorphologists have recognized that valley spacing is probably governed by a transition from hillslope (unchannelled) soil transport to channelled stream incision. Hillslope soil transport acts in a diffusive manner and tends to fill in incipient channels cut by stream flow, and competition between these two processes has long been thought to determine the scale of landscape dissection. Much progress has been made3,4,5,6, but no general theory with demonstrably predictive power has emerged — until now, that is, for Perron et al.7 (page 502 of this issue) show that the wide variation in ridge–valley spacing can be explained by a simple model of this competition in a certain class of landscape.

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Figure 1: Uniformity in ridge–valley spacing.

J. T. PERRON

Figure 2: Tentative interpretation of geological and climatic influences on valley spacing.

References

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  1. Kelin X. Whipple is in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287-1404, USA. kxw@asu.edu ,

    Kelin X. Whipple

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Whipple, K. Landscape texture set to scale. Nature 460, 468–469 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/460468a

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