This work is currently active. Interested students, postdocs, and collaborators: please feel free to contact me.
What happens to rivers when they host sediment grains that are too big for them to move? My collaborators and I explored this question in a series of numerical modeling papers. We found that the presence of large grains strongly alters the form of river longitudinal profiles, the timescales of river adjustment to baselevel fall, and the influence of the distribution of discharge magnitudes on landscape form. This work made up the bulk of my PhD at the University of Colorado (2014-2019).
See the relevant papers:
- Shobe, C.M., Turowski, J.M., Nativ, R., Glade, R.C., Bennett, G.L., and Dini, B. (in press) The role of infrequently mobile boulders in modulating landscape evolution and geomorphic hazards, Earth-Science Reviews. doi:10.1016/j.earscirev.2021.103717. Invited review.
- Shobe, C.M., Bennett, G.L., Tucker, G.E., Roback, K., Miller, S.R., and Roering, J.J. (2020) Boulders as a lithologic control on river and landscape response to tectonic forcing at the Mendocino triple junction, Geological Society of America Bulletin, doi:10.1130/B35385.1.
- Glade, R.C.*, Shobe, C.M.*, Anderson, R.S., and Tucker, G.E. (2019) Canyon form and erosion dynamics governed by channel-hillslope feedbacks, Geology, v. 47, no. 7, p. 650-654. doi:10.1130/G46219.1. *Equal author contributions.
- Shobe, C.M., Tucker, G.E., and Rossi, M.W. (2018) Variable-threshold behavior in rivers arising from hillslope-derived blocks, Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, v. 123, no. 8, p. 1,931-1,957. doi:10.1029/2017JF004575.
- Shobe, C.M., Tucker, G.E., and Anderson, R.S. (2016) Hillslope-derived blocks retard river incision, Geophysical Research Letters, v. 43, no. 10, p. 5070-5078. doi:10.1002/2016GL069262.