The mechanisms by which lithology modulates geomorphic processes are poorly known. In the Oregon Coast Range (OCR), rhythmically bedded sandstones of the Eocene Tyee Formation underlie steep, soil-mantled hillslopes, with relatively uniform ridge-valley spacing. These characteristic landforms are perturbed where diagenetic variations manifest as resistant cliffs. Here we use petrology, rock mec...

Lakes have long been recognized as being rich storehouses of environmental information. A lake basin collects water, but also sediment, much of which has been weathered and transported via fluvial processes from the near and far reaches of its drainage basin. The amount of water held in a lake is recorded on the landscape in coastal erosional and depositional landforms created at the water’s ed...

A field study conducted through a series of four field campaigns between 2005 and 2007 investigated the potential for dust emissions around the Salton Sea in California, USA. This paper explores the landform related controls on fugitive PM10 dust emissions from soil surfaces surrounding the Salton Sea by measuring soil properties combined with estimating the in situ PM10 dust emissions using a ...

Express. These orbiters are surveying the entire Martian surface to understand the planet’s past and the geological, climatic, and other processes responsible for its present state. They gather ever-increasing amounts of spatially extended data. Science data archived from all planetary missions prior to the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission totals approximately 5 terabytes. NASA expects that number to ...

In the context of molecularly-dated phylogenies, inferences informed by ancestral habitat reconstruction can yield valuable insights into the origins of biomes, palaeoenvironments and landforms. In this paper, we use dated phylogenies of 12 plant clades from the Cape Floristic Region (CFR) in southern Africa to test hypotheses of Neogene climatic and geomorphic evolution. Our combined dataset f...

We describe an application of machine learning to the problem of geomorphic mapping of planetary surfaces. Mapping landforms on planetary surfaces is an important task and the first step to deepen our understanding of many geologic processes. Until now such maps have been manually drawn by a domain expert. We describe a framework to automate the mapping process by means of segmentation and clas...

Many studies of Earth surface processes and landscape evolution rely on having accurate extensive data sets surficial geologic units landforms. Automated extraction geomorphic features using deep learning provides an objective way to consistently map landforms over large spatial extents. However, there is no consensus the optimal input feature space for such analyses. We explore impact extracti...

Scientists have long assumed that the physical structure and condition of stream and river channels have pervasive effects on biological communities and processes, but specific tests are few. To investigate the influence of the stream-reach geomorphic state on in-stream habitat and aquatic macroinvertebrate communities, we compared measures of habitat conditions and macroinvertebrate community ...

It has been proposed that ~3.4 billion years ago an ocean fed by enormous catastrophic floods covered most of the Martian northern lowlands. However, a persistent problem with this hypothesis is the lack of definitive paleoshoreline features. Here, based on geomorphic and thermal image mapping in the circum-Chryse and northwestern Arabia Terra regions of the northern plains, in combination with...

Pulses of CO2 injected into the martian atmosphere more recently than 4 Ga can place the atmosphere into a stable, higher pressure, warmer greenhouse state. One to two bar pulses of CO2 added to the atmosphere during the past several billion years are sufficient to raise global mean temperatures above 240 or 250 K for tens to hundreds of millions of years, even when accounting for CO2 condensat...