Estimating sediment transport scales with luminescence as a sediment tracer

Erosion breaks down mountains, yet it is sediment transport that removes sediment and transforms landscapes. Quantifying the rates of sediment transport is a challenging task. Luminescence, traditionally a Quaternary dating method, offers a means to help us constrain sediment transport as a unique sunlight-sensitive tracer. One of the sediment transport properties that luminescence can potentially constrain is the characteristic transport lengthscale, or hop length, that describes the mean distance of transport between long-term storage events, or rest times. Here, I discuss considerations for using luminescence to estimate hop lengths and rest times with potentially heavy- and thin- tailed probability distributions. I present recent work modeling transport distance versus in-channel sunlight exposure and highlight recent contributions in the literature that show the impressive potential of luminescence sediment tracing.