The Hawaiian islands are an excellent natural laboratory for studying the controls on long-term landscape evolution because (1) both landscape age and initial condition are known, (2) rock properties are generally uniform (but locally heterogeneous), (3) most of the global variation in annual rainfall is represented, and (4) there is no tectonics beyond the known subsidence history. Our work reinforces the perspective that much of landscape evolution – primarily canyon cutting – is a threshold-limited process. We show that commonly neglected thresholds largely define the relationship between climate and landscape evolution. Our work is unusual in that most studies of the role of thresholds in modulating climate control of erosion have been conducted in tectonically active settings where a balance between rock uplift and erosion rate creates opportunities researchers can exploit. Interestingly, however, it is the lack of tectonic activity in the Hawaiian islands that ultimately makes them better suited to definitively establish and quantify the role of thresholds in landscape evolution.

Biosketch

Kelin Whipple is a geomorphologist focused on active processes and landscape evolution in tectonically active mountain ranges. Kelin was born in Michigan, but grew up in the highlands of Ethiopia, where his love of the outdoors and exploring landscapes was born. Kelin received an A.B. in Geology at the University of California, and an M.S. (1989) and Ph.D. (1994) in Geological Sciences at the University of Washington. Kelin worked for one year as a postdoctoral fellow at the St. Anthony Falls Hydraulic Laboratory of the University of Minnesota before starting his first faculty appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995. In 2006 Kelin moved to Arizona State University as part of the development of the new School of Earth and Space Exploration. From 2001 to 2014 he was a senior member in the Earth System Evolution program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Kelin is a fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America and has received the Bagnold Medal of the European Geosciences Union (2008), the G.K. Warren Prize from the National Academy of Science (2014), and the G.K. Gilbert Award in Surface Processes from the American Geophysical Union.

Research Interests

Kelin Whipple explores the interactions among climate, topography, and tectonics. His work focuses on developing the capacity to interpret the history of tectonic activity and climate change that is recorded in landforms and associated sedimentary records. Current research activities focus on quantifying the linkages among topography, rock properties, climate, and erosion rate. Kelin leverages quantitative understanding of these linkages to explore the potential for coupling and feedback between the Earth’s interior processes and its fluid envelopes. A particular recent focus is on how the interaction between fluvial erosion and transport thresholds and the stochastic distribution of floods dictates the relationships among climate, topography, and erosion and therefore the strength of coupling between climate and tectonics. Active projects and interests span a range from small-scale modeling and both field and experimental investigation of the physics of bedrock channel erosion, to reach-scale modeling of the dynamics of bedrock channel evolution, to neotectonic studies of active deformation using geomorphic tools, and to quantitative investigation of linkages among tectonics, climate, and surface processes at mountain range scale. Applications of this work to evolution of Martian landforms and implications for the climate history of Mars is another active interest.