Changes in mountain valley widening, river incision and sediment
transport in North-West Africa during the last 180 ka of Saharan climate
Abstract
The effects of climate on eroding landscapes and the delivery of
sediment from these remain poorly understood. The sampling and dating of
river terraces provide one way to address this question, because these
embed information about the interconnected dynamics of mountain valley
widening, river incision, sediment delivery, and their sensitivity to
external forcing. We developed a new approach to OSL dose rate
correction of gravels to derive the most detailed chronology of river
terrace stratigraphy in NW Africa to date. We sampled river terraces
10-20 m above the modern river plain for dating in a 1200 km2 river
catchment, the River M’Goun, eroding the High Atlas Mountains hinterland
of the continental river Draa. We applied OSL and IRSL dating to
determine the age of 23 samples, using Bayesian methods to derive a
robust chronology. We show terrace strath planation starts at
~180 ka in the MIS 6 glacial maximum, followed by
aggradation from 140 – 57 ka in MIS 5 to MIS 4 which deposited the up
to 10 m stratigraphy of fluvial conglomerate (imbricated rounded
cobbles). Incision and abandonment of river terraces occur in MIS 3 to 2
during the transition to the last glacial maximum. Our results compared
with an Atlantic record of aridity in the Northern Sahara over the last
120 ka show that aggradation and valley widening occur in response to
periods of northward penetration of the African summer monsoon into the
High Atlas. We note that these signals persist across the different
tectonic zones, from the fold and thrust belts into the sedimentary
basins. More widely, our data demonstrate how changes in monsoon
patterns can cause changes in the erosion of mountains and transport of
sediment in arid continental interiors and these form new inputs for
numerical landscape evolution models.