RESEARCH ARTICLE Rockwall Slope Erosion in the Northwestern Himalaya 10.1029/2020JF005619 Elizabeth N. Orr1 , Lewis A. Owen2, Sourav Saha3, Sarah J. Hammer4, and Marc W. Caffee5,6 Key Points: 1GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany, 2Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric • Rates of periglacial rockwall Sciences, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA, 3Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, slope erosion are defined for the 4 northwestern Himalaya using University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Department of Geology, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, cosmogenic 10Be concentrations in USA, 5Department of Physics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, 6Department of Earth, Atmospheric and sediment from medial moraines Planetary Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA • Tectonically driven uplift offers a first-order control on patterns of rockwall slope erosion • Precipitation and temperature play Abstract Rockwall slope erosion is an important component of alpine landscape evolution, yet secondary roles in this erosion the role of climate and tectonics in driving this erosion remains unclear. We define the distribution and magnitude of periglacial rockwall slope erosion across 12 catchments in Himachal Pradesh and Jammu 10 Correspondence to: and Kashmir in the Himalaya of northern India using cosmogenic Be concentrations in sediment from 4 4 E. N. Orr, medial moraines. Beryllium-10 concentrations range from 0.5 ± 0.04 × 10 to 260.0 ± 12.5 × 10 at/g SiO2,
[email protected] which yield erosion rates between 7.6 ± 1.0 and 0.02 ± 0.004 mm/a. Between 0.02 and 8 m of rockwall slope erosion would be possible in this setting across a single millennium, and∼ >2 km when∼ extrapolated Citation: for the Quaternary period.