Many fault-bounded mountain ranges have asymmetric cross-sections, in which the main drainage divide is displaced from the range center. Although differential rock uplift is commonly invoked as the cause of this asymmetry, divide position also depends on cross-divide variations in erosional efficiency and base-level elevation. The extent to which base-level contrasts can outweigh differential uplift remains poorly constrained, particularly in fold-thrust belts where one flank commonly drains to an elevated wedge-top basin that lies tens to hundreds of meters above the opposing foreland plain.
This dataset accompanies a study that develops and applies a combined analytical and numerical framework to separate the contributions of rock-uplift rate, erosional efficiency, and cross-divide base-level difference to the steady-state position of a drainage divide. The framework is evaluated using a suite of generic landscape-evolution experiments and is then applied to the Mohand Range, a frontal anticline of the northwestern Sub-Himalaya, modeled as either a fault-bend fold or a fault-propagation fold. This repository contains: (1) The MATLAB code and input parameter files used to run the numerical landscape-evolution simulations with a modified version of the TopoToolbox Landscape Evolution Model (TTLEM; Campforts et al., 2017); (2) Basin areas and longest channel lengths extracted from the simulated steady-state drainage networks, together with the fitted Hack's law coefficient (kb) and exponent (b), for both the 74 generic experiments and the 8 Mohand-specific experiments; and (3) Simulation videos of the 8 Mohand-specific experiments, comprising four fault-bend-fold scenarios (MFBF1–MFBF4) and four fault-propagation-fold scenarios (MFPF1–MFPF4), showing the temporal evolution of topography and the migration of the drainage divide.
The movies in this dataset are supplementary to the article of Scherler and Schwanghart (submitted), in which experiments with numerical landscape evolution models have been conducted to analyze the evolution of drainage divide networks. The experiments were run in MATLAB with the TopoToolbox landscape evolution model (TTLEM) 1.0 (Campforts et al., 2017), and analyzed with the TopoToolbox v2 (Schwanghart and Scherler, 2014).
The different experiments in this dataset comprise five different setups, called ‘Initialize’, ‘Reference’, ‘Rotate’, ‘Inclined’, and ‘Spheres’, which all simulate the evolution of landscapes over 10 Million years. See Scherler and Schwanghart (submitted) for details on the different models. For each model run, we produced five different movies that were saved as Audio Video Interleave (AVI) files. All movies show the evolution of the topography and the drainage divide network, colored for different properties. Detailed description of the files is provided in the associated data description.