Feedbacks between sea-floor spreading,trade winds and precipitation in the Southern Red Sea
- 1University of Graz, Earth Science, Graz, Austria (kurt.stuewe@uni-graz.at)
- 2University of Salzburg, Geography and Geology, Salzburg, Austria
- 3National Centre of Excellence in Geology, University of Peshawar, Peshawar, Pakistan
- 4University of Milano Dept. of Earth and Environmental Sciences
- 5Isotope Geoscience Unit, Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre, East Kilbride, UK
Feedbacks between climatic and geological processes are highly controversial
and testing them is a key challenge in Earth sciences. The Great Escarpment of
the Arabian Red Sea margin has several features that make it a useful natural
laboratory for studying the effect of surface processes on deep Earth. These
include strong orographic rainfall, convex channel profiles versus concave
swath profiles on the west side of the divide, morphological disequilibrium in
fluvial channels, and systematic morphological changes from north to south
that relate to depth changes of the central Red Sea. Here we show that these
features are well interpreted with a cycle that initiated with the onset of
spreading in the Red Sea and involves feedbacks between orographic precipitation,
tectonic deformation, mid-ocean spreading and coastal magmatism.
It appears that the feedback is enhanced by the moist easterly trade
winds that initiated largely contemporaneously with sea floor spreading in the
Red Sea.
How to cite: Stüwe, K., Robl, J., Turab, S., Sternai, P., and Stuart, F.: Feedbacks between sea-floor spreading,trade winds and precipitation in the Southern Red Sea, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-16771, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-16771, 2023.
