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Reply to: Climate versus tectonics as controls on river profiles

Nature volume 612, pages E15–E17 (2022)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 21 December 2022

replying to H. Seybold et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05418-1 (2022)

In the accompanying Comment1, Seybold et al. claim that our original study2 disregarded correlations between our metric of river longitudinal profile concavity (NCI) and four morphometric variables (relief, channel gradient and length, and drainage area)3. Seybold et al.1 show that these four variables are more highly correlated with NCI than Aridity Index (a climatic classification metric), and they use these rank sum correlations to imply that tectonics have stronger control than climate over river profiles. However, the correlations presented by Seybold et al.1 are flawed for the following reasons: (1) it is well known that relief, river slope, length, and drainage area are interdependent with concavity4,5,6 and, therefore, are not independent drivers of the concavity of long profiles; (2) these four morphometric variables co-evolve with NCI in response to external forcings, including both tectonics and climate, and therefore they cannot be considered independent metrics of tectonic activity; and (3) the calculation of NCI uses relief, channel length and channel gradient in the equation (equation (1) in Chen et al.2) and, therefore, there is a direct numerical dependency between those variables and NCI. For all these reasons, it is not defensible to correlate NCI with these internally dependent morphometric variables to make the point that tectonics exert a stronger control on long profile evolution than climate.

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Fig. 1: NCI classified by aridity in tectonic v. non-tectonic regions.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Katerina Michaelides

  2. Earth Research Institute, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Katerina Michaelides & Michael Bliss Singer

  3. Institute of Water Resources Development, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan

    Shiuan-An Chen

  4. School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

    Stuart Grieve

  5. School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Michael Bliss Singer

Authors
  1. Katerina Michaelides
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  2. Shiuan-An Chen
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  3. Stuart Grieve
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  4. Michael Bliss Singer
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K.M. wrote the Reply and all other authors provided edits. S.-A.C. produced Fig. 1.

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Correspondence to Katerina Michaelides.

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Michaelides, K., Chen, SA., Grieve, S. et al. Reply to: Climate versus tectonics as controls on river profiles. Nature 612, E15–E17 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05419-0

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