Forging Signatures: Climate’s Limited Role in Shaping Mountains

A long-standing debate in the Earth Sciences bears on the question of whether top-down erosion processes govern mountain building processes, but how do we measure the topographic signature of the climate drivers independent of tectonics? I’ll discuss two natural experiments to disentangle topographic signatures previously attributed to climate. I’ll demonstrate that tectonic drivers almost completely explain the heights of mountains and orogen asymmetry.

Speaker: Jane Willenbring, Stanford University