Event Details

Speaker: Dr Barra Peak (LEC) Title: What can sand tell us about mountains?

Summary: The Himalayan mountain range famously contains the highest terrestrial mountains on Earth, and is also one of the fastest-eroding landscapes on Earth: what goes up must come down. But erosion rates are not the same everywhere and have changed over time. What drives these changes? Using sand eroded from the mountains over the last 10 million years as a record, we can look back in time to try to answer this question. This talk will present preliminary results and implications for how tectonics and climate have impacted the eastern Himalayan landscape.

Bio: Barra Peak is a postdoctoral researcher with Yani Najman. As an Earth history geologist, her work seeks to understand changes in continental topography over timescales of millions of years, with a current focus on the eastern Himalaya.