The changing shape of Earth’s landscapes over the past 100 million years has been reconstructed in more detail than ever before.
“Earth’s surface is like the living skin of our planet – it connects all the different systems, the physical, chemical, biological, and it’s constantly evolving,” says Tristan Salles at the University of Sydney, Australia, who led the project.
Salles and his colleagues modelled the past 100 million years of surface changes on Earth by pulling together the most up-to-date existing models of tectonics, climate, the movement of sediment along rivers from mountains to oceans, and other processes that shape the landscape.
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“Some models of landscape dynamics have previously been constructed to predict landslips or the stability of slopes in mines, but they have been quite local, so we had to find ways to extrapolate the modelling capability to a global scale,” says Salles.
The team validated its model by confirming it could reproduce present-day landscape dynamics, for example the sediment load that is carried along modern-day rivers.
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