Researchers at the University of Toronto Mississauga have unearthed new information detailing how powerful winds shape the landscape in a remote part of the Andes mountain range.
Researchers at the University of Toronto Mississauga have unearthed new information detailing how powerful winds shape the landscape in a remote part of the Andes mountain range.
PhD student Mitchell McMillan, a tectonic geomorphologist, and Lindsay Schoenbohm, an associate professor of chemical and physical sciences, study how tectonic forces like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions interact with climatic forces like wind and water to build up the earth’s landscape or wear it away. Their recent study of the Andes site, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, contradicts previously held theories and provides a better understanding of long-term climate-related erosion in other windswept places, including the surface of Mars.
Working in Schoenbohm’s lab, McMillan was poring over satellite imagery, searching for interesting landforms to investigate, when he spotted images of the Salina del Fraile, a small depression in the landscape in northwest Argentina.
“I noticed a strange looking landform that I wasn’t able to understand at first,” says McMillan, adding he was curious to know more about what formed the shallow depression in the red earth of the Puna Plateau.
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Image via Mitchell McMillan.
