News

September 2022: Our paper on "Dynamic bedrock channel width during knickpoint retreat enhances undercutting of coupled hillslopes", led by Edwin Baynes, is accepted for publication at ESPL.

September 2022: Marion Fournereau has just started a 3-year PhD. She will investigate, using experiments and field analysis, the influence of fractures and heterogeneities on bedrock river erosion.

September 2022: The first PhD's paper of Lucas Pelascini has been accepted for publication at NHESS! This paper investigates the respective influence of hydrological and air-pressure driven pore pressure change on landscape triggering.

July 2022: Boris Gailleton has just joined the group for a 3-years post-doc. He will try to develop a new generation of landscape evolution model "event-based" which accounts for floods, landslides, earthquakes and episodic erosion events.

March 2022: Our manuscript "Size, shape and orientation matter: fast and automatic measurement of grain geometries from 3D point clouds" is out for discussion at Esurf. The associated Matlab algorithm "G3Point" can be downloaded here: https://github.com/philippesteer/G3Point

September 2021: Our paper on a new analytical model to solve for landscape evolution in 2D is published at Esurf. Compared to previous numerical models, a main benefit of this analytical model is its computational speed and analytical accuracy, which could lead to interesting perspectives for video games or computer vision?! Anyway, the model can be tested online thanks to Boris Gailleton's great (but experimental) implementation of this code: https://bgailleton.github.io/test_web_stuff/

August 2021: Thomas Bernard first paper has just been published at Esurf. This paper is the first to investigate the topographic impact of a population of triggered landslides using direct data (Lidar data before and after the 2016 landslidogenic Kaikoura earthquake). Interestingly, we do not see any rollover for landslide area for small landslides, as we described in many older papers. This result now needs to be confirm by other similar studies.

August 2021: Our new paper entitled "Pulsed carbon export from mountains by earthquake-triggered landslides explored in a reduced-complexity model" is published here. This paper uses the same statistical model of earthquakes and triggered-landslides as in Steer et al. (2019) and Croissant et al. (2019) to investigate the role of triggered landslides on carbon export.

April 2021: Philippe Steer has submitted to Esurf his first solo-author paper. He developed a new model to solve for river erosion based on analytical solutions to the stream power law. A main benefit of this model is its computational speed and analytical accuracy.

September 2020: Thomas Bernard first paper has just been submitted to Esurf. We investigated, using “time-lapse” airborne Lidar, the topographic impact of co-seismic landsldies in the Kaikoura region (NZ). We have managed to reach unprecedented accuracy (~25 cm) and resolution to directly measure the volume and area of about 1400 landslides. We show in particular that landslide distributions do not display any rollover on small area, which is contradicting many previous studies (including ours!).

September 2020: Our new paper, led by Edwin Baynes, on the impact of sediment on channel width and channel dynamics is now published at ESPL. Edwin is a former post-doc of the geomorphology team in Rennes, and he is now an Assistant Professor in Loughborough University (UK). Future works are in preparation on the impact of knickpoints and sediment transport on river dynamics and geometry.

August 2020: Our paper on the development of a new landscape evolution model which includes landsliding is out at Geoscientific Model Development. This paper started from a collaboration between our group and colleagues at GFZ Potsdam, including Benjamin Campforts, the leading author. Expect many other interesting finding emerging from this collaboration!

July 2020: After a very competitive selection, Laure Guerit has been promoted to a permanent CNRS researcher position! Congratulations to Laure. Cherry on the pie: she will continue working in Rennes in close collaboration with the ERC FEASIBLe project, in particular on grain size measurements and on its interpretation in terms of geomorphological processes and tectonic/climatic conditions.

January 2020: Laure Guerit has just arrived for a 2-years post-doc. She will work on a systematic use of grain size measurements, based on new methodological developments, to constrain the role of initial bedrock fractures and river sediment transport on the grain-size evolution of sediments downstream large landslides.

October 2019: Lucas Pelascini has joined the project for a three years PhD. He will investigate the mechanics of landslide triggering and develop new landslide models that will be integrated to landscape evolution models. Welcome, Lucas!

August 2019: The first FEASIBLe paper is out in Esurf (https://www.earth-surf-dynam.net/7/681/2019/) We have investigated how earthquakes generate new knickpoints using a novel statistical earthquake generator. The Matlab code can be obtained on GitHub (https://github.com/philippesteer/RiverFault).