Sediment size on talus slopes correlates with fracture spacing on bedrock cliffs: implications for predicting initial sediment size distributions on hillslopes

Verdian, Joseph P.; Sklar, Leonard S.; Riebe, Clifford S.; Moore, Jeffrey R.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-9-1073-2021

Articles | Volume 9, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-9-1073-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-9-1073-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 9, issue 4

Research article

|

27 Aug 2021

Research article |

| 27 Aug 2021

Sediment size on talus slopes correlates with fracture spacing on bedrock cliffs: implications for predicting initial sediment size distributions on hillslopes

Joseph P. Verdian, Leonard S. Sklar, Clifford S. Riebe, and Jeffrey R. Moore

Data sets

Verdian_Esurf_2019_Data Leonard Sklar https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/NYGA6T

Short summary

River behavior depends on the size of rocks they carry. Rocks are born on hillslopes where erosion removes fragments from solid bedrock. To understand what controls the size of rock fragments, we measured the spacing between cracks exposed in 15 bare-rock cliffs and the size of rocks on the ground below. We found that, for each site, the average rock size could be predicted from the average distance between cracks, which varied with rock type. This shows how rock type can influence rivers.