Landscape evolution in the Himalaya

I conducted my Master's research on relief production in the Ladakh Himalaya of Jammu & Kashmir, India. Using measurements of cosmogenic beryllium-10 in mountain summits and the sediments of adjoining basins, I could use the difference between inferred denudation rates as a measure of long-term relief production. The results revealed very slow rates of landscape change in the arid region, but both summit weathering and basin erosion increased by an order of magnitude once area above the modern snowline was integrated into the summit-basin pairs. This implied that the limit of glaciation and periglacial conditions limited landscape change to only the highest altitudes studied, and may have set an upper limit on the topography of the range.

The results of this research are presented in Dietsch et al. (2014) as well as my Master's thesis.