Hydraulic Implications of Different Megaflood Canyon Incision Models

Abstract:

Deeply incised canyons are some of the most dramatic features of landscapes carved by megafloods. The geometry of these canyons may reveal information regarding flood magnitudes during the last ice age on Earth and the volume of water flowing on early Mars. Canyons on both planets have been alternatively modeled as ‘channels’, where the modern topography was completely inundated with water to the elevation of the canyon rims, or as ‘valleys’ that were progressively incised by lesser discharges. Here we combine numerical flood simulations and sediment transport mechanics to explore the hydraulic implications that result from modeling the canyons as ‘channels’ versus ‘valleys’. Over 300 floods were simulated for Moses Coulee, a 60 km-long canyon in the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington, USA, using a 2D, depth-averaged hydraulic model. We simulated floods with discharges ranging from 0.1 million m³ s^-1 to 6 million m³ s^-1 using both the modern landscape as a topographic boundary condition and synthetic topographies that restored the canyon floor to different elevations as guided by strath terraces. For each simulation we tracked whether shear stresses on the terrace treads exceeded thresholds for sliding of basalt columns. Simulations using the modern topography indicate shear stresses were sufficiently high to erode the terraces at discharges lower than bankfull, and surprisingly, shear stresses decrease with increasing discharge at some sites due to backwater dynamics, which constrains canyon formation to moderate discharges. Simulations performed on the synthetic topography suggest the canyon could have been incised progressively by floods smaller than those required to fill the canyon to bankfull stage. These results suggest the canyons can be viewed as valleys that incised progressively, as opposed to channels filled with water, which has implications for placing bounds on paleoflood hydraulic reconstruction on Earth and Mars.