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River drainage patterns in the New Zealand Alps primarily controlled by plate tectonic strain

Nature Geoscience volume 5, pages 744–748 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

River drainage patterns sculpt terrestrial landscapes. Whether these patterns contain fingerprints of past tectonic events is debated. On the one hand, elaborate dendritic river networks always retain an invariant structure, implying that rivers will simply reorganize in response to tectonic perturbations, without long-term trace of the tectonic event. On the other hand, many rivers in active mountain belts seem to be passive features and may record long-term crustal deformation. Here we use numerical simulations, constrained by drainage patterns observed in the Southern Alps of New Zealand, to analyse the response of river basins to distributed plate tectonic strain. We find that both dynamically reorganized and passively deformed rivers coexist in the Southern Alps. Rivers on the western side of the mountain range reorganize and rapidly evolve in response to tectonic deformation. In contrast, rivers on the eastern side resist reorganization and record large-scale plate tectonic influence over timescales of tens of millions of years. We conclude that both types of river drainage pattern in the Southern Alps are primarily controlled by plate tectonic strain, implying that landscape topography can be used to reconstruct the distribution of tectonic strain within zones of continental deformation around the world.

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Figure 1: Tectonic setting and topography of the South Island of New Zealand.
Figure 2: Basin deformation and reorganization in response to distributed strain in a landscape evolution model.
Figure 3: Orientation of river basins in the SANZ with respect to a plate-boundary-orthogonal direction.

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Acknowledgements

S.C. thanks J. Van Den Driessche, G. Simpson, L. Husson and B. Kaus for discussions of drainage basins and distributed deformation. We thank M. Attal and R. Norris for their constructive reviews and input on this work. P. Wessel and W. H. F. Smith are thanked for releasing freely the Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) software, version 4.5.3, with which maps and figures have been drafted. L.G. is an Awardee of the Weizmann Institute of Science—National Postdoctoral Award Program for Advancing Women in Science. S.C. was also supported by Swiss National Science Foundation Grant Number 200021-119841.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Section of Earth Sciences and Environment, University of Geneva, Rue des Maraîchers 13, 1205 Genève, Switzerland

    Sébastien Castelltort

  2. Department of Earth Sciences, ETH-Zürich, Sonneggstrasse 5, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland

    Sébastien Castelltort, Liran Goren, Sean D. Willett, Jean-Daniel Champagnac & Frédéric Herman

  3. LGCA, Université Joseph Fourier de Grenoble, 38041 Grenoble, France

    Jean Braun

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  1. Sébastien Castelltort
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Contributions

S.C. and L.G. designed the analysis, completed the interpretation and wrote the manuscript. All authors discussed the problem, methods, analyses and results and commented on the manuscript. L.G. performed the numerical simulations. S.D.W., L.G., F.H. and J.B. developed the numerical model DAC.

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Correspondence to Sébastien Castelltort.

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Castelltort, S., Goren, L., Willett, S. et al. River drainage patterns in the New Zealand Alps primarily controlled by plate tectonic strain. Nature Geosci 5, 744–748 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1582

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