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Published September 14, 2018 | Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

Abrupt drainage basin reorganization following a Pleistocene river capture

Abstract

River capture is a dramatic natural process of internal competition through which mountainous landscapes evolve and respond to perturbations in tectonics and climate. River capture may occur when one river network grows at the expense of another, resulting in a victor that steals the neighboring headwaters. While river capture occurs regularly in numerical models, field observations are rare. Here we document a late Pleistocene river capture in the Yimeng Mountains, China that abruptly shifted 25 km^2 of drainage area from one catchment to another. River terraces and imbricated cobbles indicate that the main channel incised 27 m into granitic bedrock within 80 kyr, following the capture event, and upstream propagating knickpoints and waterfalls reversed the flow direction of a major river. Topographic analysis shows that the capture shifted the river basins far from topographic equilibrium, and active divide migration is propagating the effects of the capture throughout the landscape.

Additional Information

© 2018 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received 02 February 2018; Accepted 23 August 2018; Published 14 September 2018. Data availability: The authors declare that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the paper and its supplementary files. This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51509172, 51539007, and 41376052), the Open Funding of State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology (No. SKLLQGZR1801) and the personal financial support from Zhen Wu. We thank ASTER GDEM, which is a product of NASA and METI. We thank Roman DiBiase, Huiping Zhang, Rong Yang, Chris Paola, Michael Church, Jeremy G. Venditti, and Tom Dunne for helpful discussions. We are grateful to Tianzhong Li, Zhaopeng Zhang, Ke Zhai, Xiaoyue Fan, Qianbin Sun, Weilai Fan, and Junxiang Kou for their contributions to the field surveys. We thank the reviewers for constructive comments. Author Contributions: N.F., Z.C., L.J. and M.H. conducted the field surveys. N.F. and M.L. developed the χ analysis. N.F., Z.C., M.H., M.L. and X.L. drafted the paper. The authors declare no competing interests.

Attached Files

Published - s41467-018-06238-6.pdf

Supplemental Material - 41467_2018_6238_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

Supplemental Material - 41467_2018_6238_MOESM2_ESM.pdf

Supplemental Material - 41467_2018_6238_MOESM3_ESM.pdf

Supplemental Material - 41467_2018_6238_MOESM4_ESM.zip

Supplemental Material - 41467_2018_6238_MOESM5_ESM.xlsx

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Additional details

Created:
August 24, 2023
Modified:
October 18, 2023