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Earth science

Mainly in the plain

Nature volume 495, pages 318–319 (2013)Cite this article

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The finding that global mass loss from landscapes is dominated by physical erosion and chemical weathering from flat terrain, rather than from mountains, challenges our understanding of how Earth's surface evolves.

Inexorably, everything falls apart. As individuals, we humans last only some decades or so. Our most Ozymandian creations crumble into oblivion over hundreds or thousands of years. And on million-year timescales, even the landscapes on which we build our civilizations will disappear, gradually consumed by physical erosion and chemical dissolution. How quickly these processes transform Earth's surface has been a question of great interest to geologists and geochemists.

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Figure 1: Lowland flat, mountain high.

J. W. KIRCHNER

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. James W. Kirchner is in the Department of Environmental System Sciences, ETH Zurich, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland, and at the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Birmensdorf, Switzerland.,

    James W. Kirchner

  2. Ken L. Ferrier is in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.,

    Ken L. Ferrier

Authors
  1. James W. Kirchner
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  2. Ken L. Ferrier
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Correspondence to James W. Kirchner or Ken L. Ferrier.

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Kirchner, J., Ferrier, K. Mainly in the plain. Nature 495, 318–319 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/495318a

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