A University of Massachusetts Amherst-led research team has discovered that weaker rock in mountain landscapes erodes three times faster than harder rock–even on gentler slopes–and is one of the main attributes governing mountain erosion.
A University of Massachusetts Amherst-led research team has discovered that weaker rock in mountain landscapes erodes three times faster than harder rock–even on gentler slopes–and is one of the main attributes governing mountain erosion. The finding also challenges our current understanding of the relationship between erosion and the release of carbon dioxide, and suggests that geologists and atmospheric scientists may be underestimating the CO2 contributions coming from the Earth’s rocky places.
The research, recently published in Science Advances, depends on a new technique relying on common quartz grains, the rare isotope beryllium-10 (known as 10Be) and cosmic rays from exploded stars.
Over the course of the universe’s nearly 14 billion years, countless stars have exploded, and when they do, they blast out showers of cosmic shrapnel in the form of high energy particles. These cosmic particles have been raining down on the Earth for uncountable ages in at a constant rate. When the particles penetrate rocks on the surface, 10Be is produced within quartz. For four decades, geologists have been able to harvest these quartz grains from rocks like granite and sandstone, in which the quartz grains are comparatively large, to test all sorts of hypotheses.
Read More: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Quartz grains isolated from the sediment they were found in. The next step is to dissolve them in order to extract, and ultimately measure, their beryllium-10. Top of page: Eyal Marder collecting sediment in the mountains of Colorado. (Photo Credit: Eyal Marder)
