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Climate versus tectonics as controls on river profiles

Nature volume 612, pages E13–E14 (2022)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 21 December 2022

The Original Article was published on 16 September 2019

arising from S.-A. Chen et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1558-8 (2019)

Identifying what drives the evolution of drainage basins is a major challenge in geomorphology1,2 and the question of how strongly climate influences the longitudinal profiles of rivers has been debated for decades3,4,5. In a recent Article5, Chen et al. used aridity and concavity data from 333,502 river longitudinal profiles to argue that climatic aridity is "a first-order control" on the evolution of drainage basins.

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Fig. 1: Empirical relationship of river profile concavity with climate aridity and four morphological variables.

References

  1. Leopold, L., Wolman, M. G. & Miller, J. P. Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology (Freeman, 1964).

  2. Perron, J. T. Climate and the Pace of Erosional Landscape Evolution. Annu. Rev. Earth Planet Sci. 45, 561–691 (2017).

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  5. Chen, S.-A., Michaelides, K., Grieve, S. W. D. & Singer, M. B. Aridity is expressed in river topography globally. Nature 574, 573–577 (2019).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental System Sciences, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Hansjörg Seybold & James W. Kirchner

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

    Wouter R. Berghuijs

  3. Geology, Minerals, Energy and Geophysics Science Center, US Geological Survey, Moffett Field, CA, USA

    Jeff P. Prancevic

  4. Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Birmensdorf, Switzerland

    James W. Kirchner

Authors
  1. Hansjörg Seybold
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  2. Wouter R. Berghuijs
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  3. Jeff P. Prancevic
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  4. James W. Kirchner
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All authors contributed equally to this work.

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Correspondence to Hansjörg Seybold.

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Seybold, H., Berghuijs, W.R., Prancevic, J.P. et al. Climate versus tectonics as controls on river profiles. Nature 612, E13–E14 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05418-1

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