Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing

The modelling of landscape evolution, or geomorphology, is important because it allows us to understand how mountain ranges, river systems, and other landscape features came to be as they are and how they will change in future. This in turn can help to elucidate how our climates, ecologies and fauna evolved; a heavily eroded landscape supports less forest, rainfall is affected by mountain topology, and so on. The application of surface process modelling could produce enormous economic and societal benefits in a raft of fields such as petroleum resource evaluation, land degradation, pollution dispersal, mine site rehabilitation and flood mitigation.

Surface process modelling is also a necessary counterpart to solid earth geophysics to provide the complete picture of a geological system. Indeed, the two processes are coupled; tectonic uplift affects the rate of erosion, while the movement of sediments changes the gravitational stress over an area and the build-up of heat, influencing what goes on below the continental crust. Download full PDF 152KB