Bedrock Rivers

Bedrock rivers play a critical role in landscape evolution—cutting canyons, creating relief, and driving much of landscape response to changes in climate and tectonics. The bed and banks of bedrock rivers are often covered by a thin and fairly continuous layer of alluvium, and the morphodynamics of bedrock rivers have much in common with coarse-bed alluvial rivers. Erosion of bedrock in rivers is accomplished by a suite of interacting processes, including abrasion, plucking, waterfall processes, debris-flow scour, and weathering, and is strongly modulated by river sediment load. Data on channel morphodynamics, channel-hillslope interactions, and channel steepness as a function of tectonic, climatic and lithologic conditions are critical for testing and refining river incision models.