Graphs from the article.
The figure shows results of different terrace formation models across countless combinations of parameters within the model. Through this sensitivity analyses and despite the potentially large uncertainty, a best-fit model was chosen, thus constraining the conditions under which the terrace profile was formed. Credit: Ruby et al. [2026], Figure 12
Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.
Source: AGU Advances

River terraces are archives of past environmental and climate change as they form when rivers erode into alluvial plains, leaving behind an elevated flat surface. A sequence of terraces can take tens to hundreds of thousands of years to develop, thus they potentially hold important information over the period of formation. This is the case for the extensive terraces in southern Patagonia.

Through mechanistic models of terrace formation, Ruby et al. [2026] both isolate and combine the key drivers of terrace formation and connect them with the observed terrace shapes. Some terrace shapes were shown to form only under a specific combination of model parameters. This opens a new quantitative way to reveal past tectonic, climatic, and environmental conditions and how these have changed using terraces.  

Citation: Ruby, A., McNab, F., Schildgen, T. F., Wickert, A. D., & Fernandes, V. M. (2026). How sediment supply, sea-level, and glacial isostatic oscillations drive alluvial river long-profile evolution and terrace formation. AGU Advances, 7, e2025AV002035. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV002035

—M. Bayani Cardenas, Editor, AGU Advances

Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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