Research Projects

The topography of the Earth’s mountain belts reflects a balance between tectonics, climate, and their interaction through erosion. Deciphering the temporal changes in erosion rates is fundamental for our understanding of the geomorphic impacts of climate change on landscape evolution. The effect of both the global climate cooling during the Late Cenozoic and the onset of Quaternary-like glacial cycles on erosion rates of global mountain belts is still debatable. Direct, high-resolution records of temporal variations in erosion rates can shed light on this debate. Traditional paleo-erosion rate estimates based on sediment budgets suffer from systematic biases and drawbacks related to the preservation of sedimentary records. In the last two decades, the cosmogenic radionuclide method has been widely used to estimate modern erosion rates at the basin-scale. This method, when used on ancient fluvial sediments preserved in the sedimentary records, has the excellent potential for quantifying paleo-erosion rates, which can provide powerful insights into the behavior of mountainous landscapes to climate change in the past. The Himalayan Foreland Basin (HFB) has the thick accumulation of Paleogene-Quaternary sediments eroded from the Himalaya. These sediments offer an excellent opportunity to constrain the temporal evolution of Himalayan erosion rates. The project aims at studying the well-dated HFB sediments exposed along the Haripur-Khol, Surai Khola, and Kameng River sections in the northwestern, central, and northeastern Himalaya, respectively. I will provide additional age constraints using cosmogenic ²⁶Al/¹⁰Be burial dating and estimate paleo-erosion rates by measuring the concentrations of in situ-produced cosmogenic radionuclides ¹⁰Be in the sediments exposed along these sections. To assess the paleo-hydrological and paleoclimatic conditions during erosion of the sediments in their source catchments, I will use lipid biomarker analysis from the mudstones exposed along these sections. The results will explain the geomorphic response of the Himalayan watersheds to the Late Cenozoic climate cooling and Quaternary climatic oscillations, and will thus help predictions of the geomorphic response of the Himalaya to ongoing climate change.