Articles | Volume 4, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/gchron-4-177-2022
https://doi.org/10.5194/gchron-4-177-2022
Research article
 | 
31 Mar 2022
Research article |  | 31 Mar 2022

How many grains are needed for quantifying catchment erosion from tracer thermochronology?

Andrea Madella, Christoph Glotzbach, and Todd A. Ehlers

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Cited articles

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Attal, M., Mudd, S. M., Hurst, M. D., Weinman, B., Yoo, K., and Naylor, M.: Impact of change in erosion rate and landscape steepness on hillslope and fluvial sediments grain size in the Feather River basin (Sierra Nevada, California), Earth Surf. Dynam., 3, 201–222, https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-3-201-2015, 2015. 
Avdeev, B., Niemi, N. A., and Clark, M. K.: Doing more with less: Bayesian estimation of erosion models with detrital thermochronometric data, Earth Planet. Sc. Lett., 305, 385–395, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2011.03.020, 2011. 
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Short summary
Cooling ages date the time at which minerals cross a certain isotherm on the way up to Earth's surface. Such ages can be measured from bedrock material and river sand. If spatial variations in bedrock ages are known in a river catchment, the spatial distribution of erosion can be inferred from the distribution of the ages measured from the river sand grains. Here we develop a new tool to help such analyses, with particular emphasis on quantifying uncertainties due to sample size.
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