Milankovitch-paced erosion in the southern Central Andes

G Burch Fisher; Lisa V Luna; William H Amidon; Douglas W Burbank; Bas de Boer; Lennert B Stap; Bodo Bookhagen; Vincent Godard; Michael E Oskin; Ricardo N Alonso; Erik Tuenter; Lucas J Lourens

doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36022-0

Milankovitch-paced erosion in the southern Central Andes

Nat Commun. 2023 Jan 26;14(1):424. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-36022-0.

Authors

G Burch Fisher^{1

2}, Lisa V Luna³, William H Amidon⁴, Douglas W Burbank⁵, Bas de Boer⁶, Lennert B Stap⁷, Bodo Bookhagen⁸, Vincent Godard^{9

10}, Michael E Oskin¹¹, Ricardo N Alonso¹², Erik Tuenter¹³, Lucas J Lourens¹⁴

Affiliations

¹ Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 78712, USA. gbf@ucsb.edu.
² Earth Research Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, USA. gbf@ucsb.edu.
³ Institute of Environmental Science and Geography, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.
⁴ Department of Earth and Climate Sciences, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, 05753, USA.
⁵ Earth Research Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, USA.
⁶ Earth and Climate Cluster, Faculty of Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
⁷ Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
⁸ Institute of Geoscience, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.
⁹ Aix-Marseille Univ., CNRS, IRD, INRAE, CEREGE, Aix-en-Provence, France.
¹⁰ Institut Universitaire de France, Paris, France.
¹¹ Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Davis, CA, USA.
¹² Universidad Nacional de Salta, Salta, Argentina.
¹³ Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), De Bilt, the Netherlands.
¹⁴ Department of Earth Sciences, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Abstract

It has long been hypothesized that climate can modify both the pattern and magnitude of erosion in mountainous landscapes, thereby controlling morphology, rates of deformation, and potentially modulating global carbon and nutrient cycles through weathering feedbacks. Although conceptually appealing, geologic evidence for a direct climatic control on erosion has remained ambiguous owing to a lack of high-resolution, long-term terrestrial records and suitable field sites. Here we provide direct terrestrial field evidence for long-term synchrony between erosion rates and Milankovitch-driven, 400-kyr eccentricity cycles using a Plio-Pleistocene cosmogenic radionuclide paleo-erosion rate record from the southern Central Andes. The observed climate-erosion coupling across multiple orbital cycles, when combined with results from the intermediate complexity climate model CLIMBER-2, are consistent with the hypothesis that relatively modest fluctuations in precipitation can cause synchronous and nonlinear responses in erosion rates as landscapes adjust to ever-evolving hydrologic boundary conditions imposed by oscillating climate regimes.