Abstract
Bed material abrasion is a key control on the partitioning of basin scale sediment fluxes between coarse and fine material. While abrasion is traditionally treated as a simple exponential function of transport distance and a rock-specific abrasion coefficient, experimental studies have demonstrated greater complexity in the abrasion process: the rate of abrasion varies with clast angularity, transport rate, and grain size. Yet, few studies have attempted to assess the importance of these complexities in the field setting. Furthermore, existing approaches generally neglect the heterogeneity in size, abrasion potential, and clast density of the source sediment.
Combining detailed field measurements and new modeling approaches, we quantify abrasion in the Suiattle River, a basin in the North Cascades of Washington State dominated by a single coarse sediment source: large, recurrent debris flows from a tributary draining Glacier Peak stratovolcano. Rapid downstream strengthening of river bar sediment and a preferential loss of weak, low-density vesicular volcanic clasts relative to non-vesicular ones suggest that abrasion is extremely effective in this system. The standard exponential model for downstream abrasion fails to reproduce observed downstream patterns in lithology and clast strength in the Suiattle, even when accounting for the heterogeneity of source material strength and the underestimate of abrasion rates by tumbler experiments. Incorporating transport-dependent abrasion into our model largely resolves this failure. These findings hint at the importance of abrasion and sediment heterogeneity in the morphodynamics of sediment pulse transport in river networks. A new modeling tool will allow us to tackle these questions: the NetworkSedimentTransporter, a Landlab component to model Lagrangian bed material transport and channel bed evolution. This tool will allow for future work on the interplay of bed material abrasion and size selective transport at the basin scale.
While a simplified approach to characterizing abrasion is tempting, our work demonstrates that sediment heterogeneity and transport-dependent abrasion are important controls on the downstream fate of coarse sediment in fluvial systems.
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