Landscapes are continuously shaped by tectonics and climate across geological timescales and into the present day. Sedimentary archives therefore offer a unique window providing narratives for how geomorphic systems adapt to external forcings. However, bridging the gap between modern and ancient observations is not straightforward due to preservation, buffering and shredding of environmental signals, requiring integration of both short- and long-term records scattered in landscapes and stratigraphy across time. This session aims integrate insights across timescales and methods to understand the sensitivity of modern and ancient landscapes to climatic and tectonic perturbations.
The Earth’s surface today is undergoing rapid change amidst increasing climate extremes worldwide, and recent advances in geoscience are making connections between geomorphic systems across time. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that in order to unlock projections of landscape change in the future, we must integrate our analysis from source to sink, using insights from modern short-term landscape dynamics to understand stratigraphy, and using long-term geologic approaches to unlock projections of landscape change in the present and future.
Our session will value research which uses quantitative techniques drawing on sedimentology, geomorphology, stratigraphy, geochemistry and modeling. This session will welcome a range of methods in source-to-sink analysis from modern and ancient systems to investigate the function of erosive, transport and depositional processes in inheriting, translating and preserving environmental information. The ultimate goal of this session is to improve our understanding of the dynamics of past, present, and future geomorphic systems in response to changes in tectonic and climatic boundary conditions.