Taking apart a watch and reassembling it is one thing. Rebuilding an entire river landscape from scratch is another.
A collaboration among researchers across the United States and China is offering scientists a new way to understand how river landscapes form — not only on Earth, but also on worlds like Mars and Titan.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, presents a framework for “reverse engineering” river systems by rebuilding them from basic physical principles rather than simply observing their final forms through maps or satellite imagery.
“Instead of looking at a drainage basin formed by rain falling on land and analyzing what it shows, we’ve gone and disassembled it and reassembled it in a way that tells us how it functions,” said Earth Science & Environmental Change professor emeritus Gary Parker, one of the paper’s contributing authors.
The international team combined expertise in river networks, geomorphology, sediment transport, and landscape modeling to reconstruct three-dimensional river systems from branching channel networks, channel geometry, and hillslope formation. The resulting models can estimate elevation, river width, slope, sediment transport, and flood discharge throughout an entire watershed.
Learn how understanding Earth systems can be applied on other planets