Factors Impacting Erosion

Some of the natural factors impacting erosion in a landscape include climate, topography, vegetation, and tectonic activity.

  • Climateis perhaps the most influential force impacting the effect of erosion on a landscape.
      • Climate includes precipitation and wind.
      • Climate also includes seasonal variability, which influences the likelihood of weathered sediments being transported during a weather event such as a snowmelt, breeze, or hurricane.
      • Global warming, the current period of climate change, is speeding erosion. The change in climate has been linked to more frequent and severe storms.
      • Storm surges following hurricanes and typhoons can erode kilometers of coastline and coastal habitat. These coastal areas are home to residences, businesses, and economically important industries, such as fisheries.
      • The rise in temperature is also quickly melting glaciers. The slower, more massive form of glacial erosion is being supplanted by the cumulative impact of rill, gully, and valley erosion. In areas downstream from glacial snouts, rapidly melting glaciers are contributing to sea level rise. The rising sea erodes beaches more quickly.
  • Topography, the shape of surface features of an area, can contribute to how erosion impacts that area.
      • The earthen floodplains of river valleys are much more prone to erosion than rocky flood channels, which may take centuries to erode.
      • Soft rock like chalk will erode more quickly than hard rocks like granite.
  • Vegetation can slow the impact of erosion.
      • Plant roots adhere to soil and rock particles, preventing their transport during rainfall or wind events.
      • Trees, shrubs, and other plants can even limit the impact of mass wasting events such as landslides and other natural hazards such as hurricanes.
      • Deserts, which generally lack thick vegetation, are often the most eroded landscapes on the planet.
      • Human activity altering the vegetation of an area is perhaps the biggest human factor contributing to erosion. Trees and plants hold soil in place.
      • When people cut down forests or plow up grasses for agriculture and development, the soil is more vulnerable to washing or blowing away. Landslides become more common. Water rushes over exposed soil rather than soaking into it, causing flooding.
  • Tectonic activityshapes the landscape itself, and thus influences the way erosion impacts an area.
      • Tectonic uplift, for example, causes one part of the landscape to rise higher than others.
      • In a span of about 5 million years, tectonic uplift caused the Colorado River to cut deeper and deeper into the Colorado Plateau, land in what is now the U.S. state of Arizona.
      • It eventually formed the Grand Canyon, which is more than 1,600 meters (1 mile) deep and as much as 29 kilometers (18 miles) wide in some places.