Seminários

Resumo: Sedimentary fans are a geomorphic feature seen at the transition from high slope mountain to low-slope river valley terrains. They are formed by the deposition of the sediment as the slope of the water channels sourced in the mountain range decreases.  The image below shows a classic example seen in Death Valley on the US west coast. The aim of this lecture is to demonstrate how simple models of sediment transport and deposition can model the growth of these features over time. From a relatively simple constitutive model for the transport of sediment in river channels we will construct a mass balance computational framework which is able to capture the fan’s elevation increase and toe advance over time. We will see that these models, validated with experiments, and verified with limit case solutions, exhibit the classic diffusion scaling.