The highest rates of erosion of bedrock on Earth are generally thought to occur in steep areas subject to the action of large rivers and glaciers. However, there are many deserts around the world where wind and wind-blown sand are the dominant agents of erosion and where even relatively flat bedrock landforms can be eroded as quickly as the fastest eroding rivers and glacial valleys on Earth. Relatively little is known about how wind and wind-blown sand erodes bedrock and what variables control the morphology of yardangs, the dominant landforms created in such areas. Wind erosion can also influence the behavior of faults and folds in the Earth's crust by reducing the stress caused by topography in areas of high erosion (i.e. on the windward side of a slipping fault or growing fold).
Further global climate changes will likely lead to more desertification, making wind erosion and its impacts on humans (e.g. reduced air quality) even more important to understand and predict. This project will improve our ability to quantify wind erosion, a process influencing human health and land sustainability. The project includes field areas in southern California and the Qaidam Basin of the Tibetan Plateau (in collaboration with Chinese colleagues). We will combine field work, remote sensing, numerical modeling, and geochronology to quantify the interaction between the flow of wind and wind-blown sand over topography, the erosion of that topography, and the behavior of faults and folds in Earth's crust.
This project is jointly supported by the Geomorphology and Land-use Dynamics Program, Tectonics Program, and NSF's OIIA International Science and Engineering Section.
