Refine
Has Fulltext
- no (2)
Document Type
- Article (2) (remove)
Language
- English (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (2)
Keywords
- Coral reef terraces (1)
- Drainage morphometry (1)
- Indonesia (1)
- LiDAR (1)
- Pleistocene (1)
- Sumba Island (1)
- TerraceM (1)
- Uplift (1)
- coastal geomorphology (1)
- geomorphic markers (1)
Institute
- Institut für Geowissenschaften (2) (remove)
The morphology of marine and lacustrine terraces has been largely used to measure past sea- and lake-level positions and estimate vertical deformation in a wealth of studies focused on climate and tectonic processes. To obtain accurate morphometric assessments of terrace morphology we present TerraceM-2, an improved version of our MatlabR (R) graphic-user interface that provides new methodologies for morphometric analyses as well as landscape evolution and fault-dislocation modeling. The new version includes novel routines to map the elevation and spatial distribution of terraces, to model their formation and evolution, and to estimate fault-slip rates from terrace deformation patterns. TerraceM-2 has significantly improves its processing speed and mapping capabilities, and includes separate functions for developing customized workflows beyond the graphic-user interface. We illustrate these new mapping and modeling capabilities with three examples: mapping lacustrine shorelines in the Dead Sea to estimate deformation across the Dead Sea Fault, landscape evolution modeling to estimate a history of uplift rates in southern Peru, and dislocation modeling of deformed marine terraces in California. These examples also illustrate the need to use topographic data of different resolutions. The new modeling and mapping routines of TerraceM-2 highlight the advantages of an integrated joint mapping and modeling approach to improve the efficiency and precision of coastal terrace metrics in both marine and lacustrine environments.
Sequences of coral reef terraces characterized by staircase morphologies and a homogeneous lithology make them appropriate to isolate the influence of uplift on drainage morphology. Along the northern coast of Sumba Island, Indonesia, we investigated the correlations between landscape morphology and uplift rates, which range from 0.02 to 0.6 mm.yr(-1). We studied eight morphometric indices at two scales: whole island (similar to 11,000 km(2)) and within sequences of reefal terraces (similar to 3000 km(2)). At the latter scale, we extracted morphometric indices for 15 individual catchments draining mostly the reefal terraces and for 30 areas undergoing specific ranges of uplift rates draining only the reefal terraces. Indices extracted from digital elevation models include residual relief, incision, stream gradient indices (SL and k(sn)), the hypsometric integral, drainage area, mean relief, and the shape factor. We find that SL, the hypsometric integral, mean relief and the shape factor of catchments positively correlate with uplift rates, whereas incision, residual relief, and k(sn) do not. More precisely, we find that only the areas that are uplifting at a rate faster than 03 mm.yr(-1) can yield the extreme values for these indices, implying that these extreme values are indicative of fast uplifting areas. However, the relationship is not bivalent because any uplift rate can be associated with low values of the same indices. For all indices, the transient conditions of the drainage influence the correlation with Pleistocene mean uplift rates, illustrating the necessity to extract morphometric indices with an appropriate choice of catchment scale. This type of analysis helps to identify the morphometric indices that are most useful for tectonic analysis in areas of unknown uplift, allowing for easy identification of short spatial variations of uplift rate and detection of areas with relatively fast uplift rates in unstudied coastal zones. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.