Articles | Volume 10, issue 3
https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-10-383-2022
https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-10-383-2022
Research article
 | 
03 May 2022
Research article |  | 03 May 2022

The direction of landscape erosion

Colin P. Stark and Gavin J. Stark

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Short summary
Landscape erosion is generally considered to take place vertically downward. Here, by writing gradient-driven erosion in Hamiltonian form, we show this is not true. Instead, we find it takes place in two directions simultaneously: (i) normal to the surface and (ii) along rays pointing upstream and either up or down depending on how erosion rate scales with slope. The rays follow the shortest time paths that determine how long it takes for a landscape to respond to changes in external conditions.