Scientists today published new research revealing a detailed and dynamic model of Earth’s surface over the past 100 million years. According to the research, the research provides for the first time a high-resolution understanding of how today’s geophysical landscape was created and how millions of tons of sediment flowed into the oceans.
Climate, tectonics and time combine to create powerful forces that shape the face of our planet. Add the gradual shaping of the earth’s surface by rivers, and what appears to us as solid as rock is constantly changing.
However, our understanding of this dynamic process has been patchy at best. To predict the future, we need to understand the past. But our geological models have provided only a fragmented understanding of how the recent physical features of our planet formed,” said lead author Tristan Salles of the University of Sydney School of Geosciences in Australia.
“If you’re looking for a coherent model of the interplay between watersheds, global-scale erosion, and high-resolution sediment deposition over the last 100 million years, it simply doesn’t exist,” Salles said.
“So this is a big advance. It’s not just a tool that will help us explore the past, but it will also help scientists understand and predict the future,” Salles said. In collaboration with scientists in France, geoscientists from the University of Sydney published this new model in the journal Science.
Using a framework including geodynamics, tectonics and climate forces with surface processes, the scientific team presented a new dynamic model of the past 100 million years with high resolution, up to 10 kilometers, divided into million-year time frames, the research said.
“This unprecedented high-resolution model of Earth’s recent past will equip geoscientists with a more complete and dynamic understanding of the Earth’s surface,” said second author Laurent Husson of the Institut des Sciences de la Terre in Grenoble, France.
“Critically, it captures the dynamics of land-to-ocean sediment transport in a way we haven’t been able to before,” Husson said.
Salles said understanding the flow of Earth’s sediments into the marine environment is vital to understanding current ocean chemistry.
“As ocean chemistry is changing rapidly due to human-induced climate change, having a more complete picture can help our understanding of the marine environment,” he said.
The model will allow scientists to test different theories about how Earth’s surface will respond to changing climate and tectonic forces, the research said.
The research also provides an improved model for understanding how terrestrial sediment transport regulates the planet’s carbon cycle over millions of years, he said.
“Our findings will provide scientists in other fields with a dynamic and detailed background for preparing and testing hypotheses such as biochemical cycles or biological evolution,” said Salles.
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