Floodplain Weathering

Chemical weathering of rocks is central to Earth’s biogeochemical cycles. It exchanges CO2 with the atmosphere, balances CO2 emission from the mantle, and stabilizes Earth’s climate.

Years of research have established data and models of weathering in eroding landscapes, because erosion supplies unweathered rocks to the surface of the Earth. However, the sediment eroded from mountains can continue to weather during temporary storage in wide floodplains.

Recent estimates indicate that floodplain sediments may contribute over 50% of the global weathering flux; yet, we do not have a framework to quantify floodplain weathering or predict its sensitivity to climate and tectonics.

A quantitative understanding of floodplain weathering will allow building new models of the global carbon cycle, and it will increase the accuracy of tools to predict Earth’s response to natural and anthropogenic perturbations in CO2.

I propose an ambitious, innovative, and multidisciplinary research program to develop, quantify, and test a model for weathering fluxes as a function of sediment transport and storage on floodplains.

The predictive power of the model will be tested against new data from floodplains influenced by different tectonic and climatic boundary conditions.

Thus, FloW will yield a novel framework to link physical and chemical mass fluxes across Earth’s surface, potentially transforming the power of simulations of Earth’s carbon cycle and climate evolution.