Feedbacks between sea-floor spreading, trade winds and precipitation in the Southern Red Sea

Stüwe, K., Robl, J., Turab, S. A., Sternai, P. and Stuart, F. M. (2022) Feedbacks between sea-floor spreading, trade winds and precipitation in the Southern Red Sea. Nature Communications, 13, 5405. (doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-32293-1) (PMID:36109491) (PMCID:PMC9477833)

Abstract

Feedbacks between climatic and geological processes are highly controversial and testing them is a key challenge in Earth sciences. The Great Escarpment of the Arabian Red Sea margin has several features that make it a useful natural laboratory for studying the effect of surface processes on deep Earth. These include strong orographic rainfall, convex channel profiles versus concave swath profiles on the west side of the divide, morphological disequilibrium in fluvial channels, and systematic morphological changes from north to south that relate to depth changes of the central Red Sea. Here we show that these features are well interpreted with a cycle that initiated with the onset of spreading in the Red Sea and involves feedbacks between orographic precipitation, tectonic deformation, mid-ocean spreading and coastal magmatism. It appears that the feedback is enhanced by the moist easterly trade winds that initiated largely contemporaneously with sea floor spreading in the Red Sea.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: P.S. was supported by the project Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2022 of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Milano-Bicocca funded by MIUR.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Stuart, Professor Fin
• Authors: Stüwe, K., Robl, J., Turab, S. A., Sternai, P., and Stuart, F. M.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre
• Journal Name: Nature Communications
• Publisher: Nature Research
• ISSN: 2041-1723
• ISSN (Online): 2041-1723
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2022 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Nature Communications 13: 5405
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License