A global rate of denudation from cosmogenic nuclides in the Earth's largest rivers

Abstract

Cosmogenic nuclide analysis in sediment from the Earth's largest rivers yields mean denudation rates of the sediment-producing areas that average out the local variations commonly found in small rivers. Using this approach, we measured in situ cosmogenic 26Al and 10Be in sand of >50 large rivers over a range of climatic and tectonic regimes covering 32% of the Earth's terrestrial surface. In 35% of the analyzed rivers, we find 26Al/10Be ratios significantly lower than these nuclides´ surface-production-rate ratio of 6.75 in quartz, indicating radioactive decay over periods exceeding 0.5 Myr. We invoke a combination of slow erosion, shielding in the source area, and sediment storage and burial during long-distance transport to explain these low ratios. In the other 65% of studied rivers we find 26Al/10Be ratios within uncertainty of their surface production-rate ratio, indicating cosmogenic steady state. For these rivers, we obtain a global source area denudation rate of 141 t/km2×yr (54 mm/kyr of rock-equivalent) that translates to a flux of 3.07 ± 0.56 Gt/yr. By assuming that this sub-dataset is representative of the global land surface, we upscale this value to the total surface area for exorheic basins, thereby obtaining a global denudation flux of 15.2 ± 2.8 Gt/yr that integrates over the past 11 kyr. This value is slightly lower than published values from cosmogenic nuclides from small river basins (23 (+53/−16)) Gt/yr) upscaled using a global slope model, and also lower than modern sediment and dissolved loads exported to the oceans (24.0 Gt/yr). Our new approach confirms an estimate of global dissolved and solid matter transfer that converges to an encouragingly narrow range of within 35%; whereas the use of paired nuclides in large rivers provides estimates of the buffering timescales of sediment transport.

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