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Changes in mountain valley widening, river incision and sediment transport in North-West Africa during the last 180 ka of Saharan climate
  • +8
  • Jesse Zondervan,
  • Martin Stokes,
  • Sarah Boulton,
  • Anne Mather,
  • Matt Telfer,
  • Jan-Pieter Buylaert,
  • Mayank Jain,
  • Andrew Murray,
  • Alaeddine Belfoul,
  • Madeleine Hann,
  • Nawfal Taleb
Jesse Zondervan
University of Plymouth

Corresponding Author:jesse.zondervan@plymouth.ac.uk

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Martin Stokes
University of Plymouth
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Sarah Boulton
University of Plymouth
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Anne Mather
University of Plymouth
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Matt Telfer
University of Plymouth
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Jan-Pieter Buylaert
Nordic Laboratory for Luminescence Dating, Department of Geoscience, Aarhus University, Risø Campus
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Mayank Jain
Technical University of Denmark
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Andrew Murray
Nordic Laboratory for Luminescence Dating
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Alaeddine Belfoul
Ibn Zohr University
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Madeleine Hann
The University of Manchester
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Nawfal Taleb
Ibn Zohr University
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Abstract

The effects of climate on eroding landscapes and the delivery of sediment from these remain poorly understood. The sampling and dating of river terraces provide one way to address this question, because these embed information about the interconnected dynamics of mountain valley widening, river incision, sediment delivery, and their sensitivity to external forcing. We developed a new approach to OSL dose rate correction of gravels to derive the most detailed chronology of river terrace stratigraphy in NW Africa to date. We sampled river terraces 10-20 m above the modern river plain for dating in a 1200 km2 river catchment, the River M’Goun, eroding the High Atlas Mountains hinterland of the continental river Draa. We applied OSL and IRSL dating to determine the age of 23 samples, using Bayesian methods to derive a robust chronology. We show terrace strath planation starts at ~180 ka in the MIS 6 glacial maximum, followed by aggradation from 140 – 57 ka in MIS 5 to MIS 4 which deposited the up to 10 m stratigraphy of fluvial conglomerate (imbricated rounded cobbles). Incision and abandonment of river terraces occur in MIS 3 to 2 during the transition to the last glacial maximum. Our results compared with an Atlantic record of aridity in the Northern Sahara over the last 120 ka show that aggradation and valley widening occur in response to periods of northward penetration of the African summer monsoon into the High Atlas. We note that these signals persist across the different tectonic zones, from the fold and thrust belts into the sedimentary basins. More widely, our data demonstrate how changes in monsoon patterns can cause changes in the erosion of mountains and transport of sediment in arid continental interiors and these form new inputs for numerical landscape evolution models.