Session II details: Tectonics and Surface Processes

Conveners: Fabien Graveleau (U Lille), Niels Hovius (GFZ/U Potsdam)
Keynote Speakers:

• Ritske Huismans (U Bergen): Interaction and feedback between surface processes and mountain building.
• Stéphane Dominguez (U Montpellier II): Joint analog modeling of marine and terrestrial geological processes: state of the art and new developments. 

Interactions between tectonics and surface processes are a primary control on the dynamics of topography, deformation of the lithosphere and the evolution of sedimentary basins. Due to this link, landforms contain information about tectonic processes, basins about the development of surrounding topography, and lithospheric structures about the history of Earth’s surface. To read this information, and to resolve with it processes that happen elsewhere in this coupled system is an outstanding challenge in the Geosciences. Different approaches must come together to address this challenge. Geomorphic, geological, sedimentological and geophysical observations can describe past or present manifestations of the system, but such observations do not necessarily resolve the nature of the processes that link between tectonics and surface processes, and their characteristic scales. Numerical and analogue modelling can fill this gap with simplifications and abstractions of the essential physics of the system, yielding predictions that can be tested against the geological reality. To this session, we warmly welcome works that develop both approaches, as well as innovative contributions addressing technical and theoretical challenges in modelling of the interactions between tectonics and surface processes.