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Doubt cast on how the pace of global glacial erosion responds to climate cooling

Mountain erosion is thought to have sped up globally over the past few million years as the climate cooled and glaciers grew. A reassessment of the data suggests that this acceleration was limited to just a few regions.
  1. Eric Kirby

    1. Eric Kirby is in the College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon 97330, USA.

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A long-standing question in Earth sciences has been whether the climatic cooling that has occurred over the past 4 million to 6 million years — and the consequent growth of glaciers in temperate mountain ranges — accelerated the global rate at which Earth’s surface has eroded. The answer has important implications for our understanding of the interplay between climate, landscape topography and plate tectonics1. In a 2013 paper in Nature, Herman et al.2 evaluated the thermal histories of thousands of rocks sampled from dozens of mountain ranges, and concluded that rapid cooling of these samples heralded an acceleration in erosion driven by mountain glaciers. Schildgen and colleagues3 report in this week’s Nature that the apparent changes in erosion rates over time calculated in that study were largely the result of data being combined from samples that had separate erosion histories and that took different times to reach Earth’s surface.

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Nature 559, 34-35 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05563-6

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