Determining sediment flux of the Rhine over the next 10,000 years using Badlands
A feasibility study on using Badlands for future climatic and anthropogenic land use changes with a case study on determining the sediment flux of the Lower Rhine
J.M. Steinvoort (TU Delft - Civil Engineering & Geosciences)
Remi Charton – Mentor (TU Delft - Applied Geology)
S.C. Toby – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Applied Geology)
Kieran Dunne – Coach (TU Delft - Rivers, Ports, Waterways and Dredging Engineering)
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Abstract
Sediments play a crucial role in civil engineering branches like delta and river flood risk management and in maintaining natural ecosystems. Changes in the availability of sediment can have a major impact on all of these. It is therefore crucial to understand how sediment load in a source-to-sink system behaves in changing environments. Studies quantifying these behaviors often do not span further than a few decades to a hundred years. Carbon emissions will likely have an effect on our climate on the much larger scale of millennia. Humans have begun to plan and adapt their behavior to mitigate climate change by way of greenification of urban areas and replacing traditional agricultural practices by more sustainable alternatives. This study looks at the influence of climate change and different anthropogenic land use changes on the sediment load of the river Rhine by integrating tectonics, sea-level and precipitation change, and land use change for the coming 10,000 years using Badlands. This is done by utilizing a scenario-based approach. The essential role of topsoil dynamics, and a lack thereof in traditional landscape evolution models, such as Badlands, was identified. Using a general scale of topsoil and bedrock erodibilities calibrated to produce realistic sediment load in the Rhine, we found that any implementation of more sustainable land use like agroforestry is predicted to decrease the sediment load of the Rhine in most climate change scenarios, agreeing with similar studies that focused on short-term modeling. Implementing non-uniform precipitation change resulted in significantly different outcomes than using a uniform approximation, so it is advised to implement region-based precipitation change. Furthermore, Badlands has shown impressive versatility and adaptability, and shows potential to be used for the growing demand of studies that focus on predicting future influences of different processes in light of climate change using a holistic process-based approach.