The oceans are the final destination of weathering products from the land and its transport via rivers, with those in the Himalayan mountains alone moving one billion tons of sediment each year. To understand the storage dynamics of mountain valley systems, it is important to determine the spatial distribution of rivers, their volumes and longevity on seasonal and longer-term timescales. This is especially true given erosion processes widen valleys and therefore expand the spatial distribution of sediment influxes to oceans.
aimed to determine the controls on the changing valley shapes of the Himalayas and how this impacts sediment storage. Dr. Fiona Clubb, from Durham University, UK, and colleagues used automated software to take 1.5 million measurements across valley floors in the Himalayas to monitor width changes.
The research team's model of two end-member states of high and low sediment transport capacity had commonality in high rates of rock uplift increasing channel slopes and therefore the velocity of river water flowing through the area. Consequently, the erosive action of the more powerful water flow would incise the underlying bedrock and so narrows the valley floor.
Despite the expected increase in channel incision with greater water velocities in rivers from previous modeling, Dr. Clubb's team found this correlation to be weak in the Himalayan mountain range. They also found a negative correlation between water velocity and channel steepness, consistently so, no matter what the bedrock lithology was comprised of.
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