Climate changes and the formation of fluvial terraces in central Amazonia

Climate changes have been considered as an essential factor controlling the shaping of the recent alluvial landscapes in central Amazonia, with implications for explaining the biogeographic patterns in the region. This landscape is characterized by wide floodplains and various terrace levels at different elevations. A set of older terraces with ages between 50’000 and > 200’000 yrs occupy the higher portions of central Amanzonia, whereas multiple terraces next to floodplains occur at lower elevations and display ages of a few thousands of years. These lower terraces, referred to as mid-lower terraces, reveal what can be perceived as a stochastic pattern both in space and time. Despite the widespread occurrence of these geomorphic features, no process-oriented analysis has been conducted to explain their formation. Here, we develop a landscape evolution model referred to as SPASE to explicitly account for fluvial erosion and deposition in combination with lateral channel migration to explore the controls on terrace development. The model results show that the higher terraces were deposited under the condition of a higher base-level for the basins upstream of the confluence between the Solimões and Negro Rivers. The subsequent decrease in the base level initiated a phase of gradual incision, thereby resulting in the current fluvial configuration. The model also predicts that high-frequency climate changes yielded in the construction of mid-lower terraces at various elevations, which however, are all situated at lower elevation than the higher terrace levels. Our model shows that dry-to-wet shifts in climate, in relation to the modern situation, yield a landscape architecture where mid-lower terrace levels are better preserved than wet-to-dry changes in climate, again if the current situation is considered as reference. Finally, our results show that fast and widespread landscape changes possibly occurred in response to high-frequency climate changes in central Amazonia, at least since the Late Pleistocene, with great implications for the distribution and connectivity of different biotic environments in the region. Because of this short time scale of response to external perturbations, we suggest that the streams in Central Amazonia possibly also respond in rapid and sensitive ways to human perturbations.