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Global dominance of tectonics over climate in shaping river longitudinal profiles

Nature Geoscience volume 14, pages 503–507 (2021)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 15 July 2021

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Abstract

River networks are striking features engraved into the surface of the Earth, shaped by uplift and erosion under the joint influence of climate and tectonics. How a river’s gradient changes as it descends along its course—its longitudinal profile concavity—varies greatly from one basin to the next, reflecting the interplay between uplift and erosional processes. A recent global analysis has suggested that climatic aridity should be a first-order control on river profile concavity, but the importance of climate relative to other factors has not been tested at global scale. Here, we show, using recent global datasets of climate, river profiles and tectonic activity, that tectonics is much more strongly expressed than climate in global patterns of river profile concavity. River profiles tend to be more strongly concave in tectonically active regions along plate boundaries, reflecting tectonically induced spatial variations in uplift rates. Rank correlations between river profile concavity and four global tectonic proxies (basin-averaged channel gradients, distance to plate boundaries and two measures of seismic activity) are much stronger than those between river concavity and three climate metrics (precipitation, potential evapotranspiration and aridity). We explain the association between tectonic activity and increased river profile concavity through a simple conceptual model of long-term uplift and river incision. These results show that tectonics, and not climate, exerts dominant control on the shape of river longitudinal profiles globally.

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Fig. 1: Definition of the normalized concavity index.
Fig. 2: Global distributions of basin-averaged river longitudinal profile concavity (NCI) and tectonic plate boundaries.
Fig. 3: Global distributions of basin-averaged climate characteristics and proxies of tectonic activity.
Fig. 4: Correlations between river profile concavity and tectonic and climatic indices.

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Data availability

All data used in this study are available in the Supplementary Information or via the cited sources. The model outputs that support the findings of this study are available in Supplementary Table 1. NCI, aridity and slope data are available at https://doi.org/10.17636/010581627. Precipitation data22 are available at https://www.worldclim.org/data/v1.4/worldclim14.html. Potential evapotranspiration data23 are available at https://cgiarcsi.community/data/global-aridity-and-pet-database/. Plate boundary data24 are available at https://github.com/fraxen/tectonicplates. HydroSHEDS data25 are available at https://www.hydrosheds.org. GEM data20 are available at https://www.globalquakemodel.org. GSHAP data21 are available at https://www.gfz-potsdam.de/en/GSHAP. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The numerical code we used to analyse the data is available upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Global Earthquake Model Foundation for providing the Global Earthquake Model’s Global Seismic Hazard Map.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Hansjörg Seybold, Wouter R. Berghuijs.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Hansjörg Seybold, Wouter R. Berghuijs & James W. Kirchner

  2. Department of Earth Sciences, Free University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Wouter R. Berghuijs

  3. Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Jeff P. Prancevic & James W. Kirchner

  4. Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Birmensdorf, Switzerland

    James W. Kirchner

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Contributions

H.S., J.P.P., J.W.K. and W.R.B. conceived the idea and designed the study. H.S. analysed the data. J.W.K. led the analysis in Supplementary section 2, with contributions from W.R.B. and H.S. All authors contributed to interpreting the results. W.R.B. and J.W.K. led the writing, with contributions from all authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wouter R. Berghuijs.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature Geoscience thanks Kelin Whipple and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editors: James Super; Tamara Goldin.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Correlations between river profile concavity and peak ground acceleration in the Global Seismic Hazard Assessment Program model (GSHAP21).

Panel (a) and panel (b) display these correlations with and without averaging over basins, respectively. The rank correlations are similar to those reported in the main paper for peak ground acceleration from the Global Earthquake Model20 (Fig. 4a) and Extended Data Fig. 2a.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Correlations between river profile concavity and tectonic and climatic indices without averaging over basins.

Binned river segment concavity index (NCI) values7 are strongly correlated with three indices of tectonic activity: peak ground acceleration from the Global Earthquake Model20 (a), the distance to the nearest plate boundary24 (b), and mean river profile gradient7 (slope, c). NCI values are only weakly correlated with three climatic indices: precipitation22 (P, d), potential evapotranspiration23 (PET, e), and aridity index7,23 (P/PET, f). Spearman rank correlations (ρ) are shown for the un-binned values. The rank correlations of the plotted (that is, binned) points are visibly stronger, but vary depending on the details of the binning. The data are averaged within 50 bins each containing 2 percent of the data.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary text, Figs. 1–4 and Tables 1 and 2.

Source data

Source Data Figs. 2–4

Basin-averaged values for all variables used in this analysis.

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Seybold, H., Berghuijs, W.R., Prancevic, J.P. et al. Global dominance of tectonics over climate in shaping river longitudinal profiles. Nat. Geosci. 14, 503–507 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00720-5

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