In the foreland of the Tian Shan, rivers erode kilometer-wide platforms into folds that are rapidly uplifting. In our new paper, we show that the existence of these eroded surfaces implies that rivers must have changed the rate at which they migrate laterally by as much as an order of magnitude over timescales of thousands of years. Such large changes in the lateral erosion rate seem to occur in response to much smaller (less than order-of magnitude) changes in climate or tectonics. Get the full story in our new paper:

Bufe, A., Burbank, D.W., Bookhagen, B., Liu, L., Chen, J., Li, T., Thompson, J., Yang, H. (2017) Variations of lateral bedrock erosion rates control planation of uplifting folds in the foreland of the Tian Shan, NW China. Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, 122(12), 2431-2467. Journal Link