| Understanding how the surface of the Earth records and responds to various climatic, tectonic, erosive, and biotic forcings is at the heart of the geomorphology discipline and requires complex topographic, numerical, and geochemical toolsets to test and evolve current axioms. Google Earth has revolutionized the way people interact with high-spatial resolution imagery across Earth and the solar system, yet has remained largely underutilized to date for making quantitative measurements of landscape form and function. Examples of such utility and potential caveats are demonstrated for quantifying hillslope mass wasting events in Haiti, strike-slip offsets in the eastern California shear zone, and channel planform geometry in the tectonically active Himalaya. More detailed analysis comparing channel widths from Google Earth using the ChanGeom extraction methodology, as developed in this study, with field- and lidar-derived datasets attests to the quality and utility of such methods and provides key information about channel response to tectonic forcings across a host of regimes. Lastly, accurate channel widths are utilized in the Himalaya to derive erosion proxies based on specific stream power estimates and are compared with 60 cosmogenic radionuclide derived erosion rates in the western Himalaya. Within the complex interactions among surface processes, precipitation gradients, and relict topography in the Himalaya, these data indicate that tectonic deformation emerges as the dominant driver of landscape form at the centennial to millennial timescale. |
