ALBERT

Description: With accelerating climate cooling in the late Cenozoic, glacial and periglacial erosion became more widespread on the surface of the Earth. The resultant shift in erosion patterns significantly changed the large-scale morphology of many mountain ranges worldwide. Whereas the glacial fingerprint is easily distinguished by its characteristic fjords and U-shaped valleys, the periglacial fingerprint is more subtle but potentially prevailing in some landscape settings. Previous models have advocated a frost-driven control on debris production on steep headwalls and glacial valley sides. Here we investigate the important role that periglacial processes also play in less steep parts of mountain landscapes. Understanding the influences of frost-driven processes in low-relief areas requires a focus on the consequences of an accreting soil-mantle, which characterizes such surfaces. In this paper, we present a new model that quantifies two key physical processes: frost cracking and frost creep, as a function of both temperature and sediment thickness. Our results yield new insights to how climate and sediment transport properties combine to scale the intensity of periglacial processes. The thickness of the soil-mantle strongly modulates the relation between climate and the intensity of mechanical weathering and sediment flux. Our results also point to an offset between the conditions that promote frost cracking and those that promote frost creep, indicating that a stable climate can only provide optimal conditions for one of those processes at a time. Finally, quantifying these relations also opens the possibility of including periglacial processes in large-scale, long-term landscape evolution models, as demonstrated in a companion paper.

Description: There is growing recognition of strong periglacial control on bedrock erosion in mountain landscapes, including the shaping of low-relief surfaces at high elevations (summit flats). But, as yet, the hypothesis that frost action was crucial to the assumed Late Cenozoic rise in erosion rates remains compelling and untested. Here we present a landscape evolution model incorporating two key periglacial processes – regolith production via frost cracking and sediment transport via frost creep – which together are harnessed to variations in temperature and the evolving thickness of sediment cover. Our computational experiments time-integrate the contribution of frost action to shaping mountain topography over million-year timescales, with the primary and highly reproducible outcome being the development of flattish or gently convex summit flats. A simple scaling of temperature to marine δ18O records spanning the past 14 Myr indicates that the highest summit flats in mid- to high-latitude mountains may have formed via frost action prior to the Quaternary. We suggest that deep cooling in the Quaternary accelerated mechanical weathering globally by significantly expanding the area subject to frost. Further, the inclusion of subglacial erosion alongside periglacial processes in our computational experiments points to alpine glaciers increasing the long-term efficiency of frost-driven erosion by steepening hillslopes.

Description: With accelerating climate cooling in the late Cenozoic, glacial and periglacial erosion became more widespread on the surface of the Earth. The resultant shift in erosion patterns significantly changed the large-scale morphology of many mountain ranges worldwide. Whereas the glacial fingerprint is easily distinguished by its characteristic fjords and U-shaped valleys, the periglacial fingerprint is more subtle but potentially prevails in some mid- to high-latitude landscapes. Previous models have advocated a frost-driven control on debris production at steep headwalls and glacial valley sides. Here we investigate the important role that periglacial processes also play in less steep parts of mountain landscapes. Understanding the influences of frost-driven processes in low-relief areas requires a focus on the consequences of an accreting soil mantle, which characterises such surfaces. We present a new model that quantifies two key physical processes: frost cracking and frost creep, as a function of both temperature and sediment thickness. Our results yield new insights into how climate and sediment transport properties combine to scale the intensity of periglacial processes. The thickness of the soil mantle strongly modulates the relation between climate and the intensity of mechanical weathering and sediment flux. Our results also point to an offset between the conditions that promote frost cracking and those that promote frost creep, indicating that a stable climate can provide optimal conditions for only one of those processes at a time. Finally, quantifying these relations also opens up the possibility of including periglacial processes in large-scale, long-term landscape evolution models, as demonstrated in a companion paper.

Description: An increasing number of studies point to a strong periglacial control on bedrock erosion in mountain landscapes. Periglacial processes have also been suggested to control the formation of block-fields on high-elevation, low-relief surfaces (summit flats) found in many alpine landscapes. However, to which degree periglacial processes took part in accelerating global erosion rates in response to Late Cenozoic cooling still remains as an unanswered question. In this study, we present a landscape evolution model that incorporates two periglacial processes; frost cracking and frost creep, which both depend on the mean annual temperature (MAT) and sediment thickness. The model experiments allow us to time-integrate the contribution of periglacial processes to mountain topography over million-year time scales. It is a robust result of our experiments that periglacial frost activity leads to the formation of smooth summit flats at elevations dominated by cold climatic conditions through time periods of millions of years. Furthermore, a simplistic scaling of temperatures to δ18O values through the late-Cenozoic indicates that many of the highest summit flats in mid- to high-latitude mountain ranges can have formed prior to the Quaternary. The model experiments also suggest that cooling in the Quaternary accelerated periglacial erosion by expanding the areas affected by periglacial erosion significantly. A computational experiment combining glacial and periglacial erosion furthermore suggests that landscape modifications associated with glacial activity may increase the long-term average efficiency of the frost-related processes.