Landscapes Live

EGU-GM Online Seminars in Geomorphology

Landscapes Live is a weekly online seminar series freely accessible to the international scientific community interested in various aspects of geomorphology. Our talks take place on Zoom every Thursday, starting at 4pm time of Paris/Berlin/Amsterdam. Check your local time here.

Landscapes Live is affiliated to the Geomorphology (GM) division of EGU and contribute to develop its virtual activities. Indeed, EGU is pioneering a new CampFire concept to bring together the geoscience community in between General Assemblies. We hope that this helps us in our transition to a greener future and ensure that our community better serve the needs of all scientists regardless of international mobility.

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Landscapes Live Pacific seminar series

Fall 2026 Seminar Series

Thursday, 15 October 2026 at 16:00 CEST

Yuval Shmilovitz (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)

The threshold sieve: resolving hydroclimate variability and sediment heterogeneity to improve landscape understanding

The transport of rock fragments is a key process that shapes the Earth's landscape and is filtered by processes across the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. Yet quantifying the rate and pattern of sediment transport under hydroclimate variability, given fragment properties and ecohydrological feedbacks, remains a persistent challenge for understanding landscape origins. In this talk, I introduce tools and computational approaches developed to quantify these dynamics from catchment to mountain-range scales and show how they improve understanding of landscape evolution.

The first part of the talk presents an Earthcasting approach that integrates sub-daily rainfall forcing into a Holocene-scale landscape evolution framework for dryland catchments. I especially highlight the role of changes in the tail of the sub-daily rainfall distribution in shaping fast-evolving gullied landforms. I also discuss how shifting rainburst regimes over the recent geological past could trigger erosion-deposition cycles in low-order catchments, and how integrating information from a convection-permitting weather model with landscape evolution modeling reveals possible transitions to a distinct climate-erosion state in the near future.

The second part presents a new numerical application of a theory for heterogeneous sediment transport in mountainous gravel-bed rivers. I introduce the Enhanced Gravel Bedrock Eroder (EGBE), a new Landlab component that simultaneously evolves a gravel-sized alluvial layer and the underlying bedrock. One-dimensional experiments on river profiles show that channel steepness is strongly controlled by sediment size and its spatial organization. Two-dimensional experiments then provide testable predictions on river network concavity and planform geometry that result from sediment size and hardness. Finally, experiments on sediment heterogeneity indicate that coarser or harder sediment supplied from a localized upstream source can influence the entire drainage network and produce asymmetric drainage divides. Overall, this talk shows how integrating high-resolution hydroclimate and detailed sediment properties into landscape evolution models can address scientific questions across spatiotemporal scales.

Zoom link for registration: https://cuboulder.zoom.us/meeting/register/Sq6Km1gtQVac_bPHqnZ6fw#/registration