Quantifying erosion in a pre-Alpine catchment at high resolution with concentrations of cosmogenic 10Be, 26Al, and 14C

Quantifying erosion across spatial and temporal scales is essential for assessing different controlling mechanisms and their contribution to long-term sediment production. However, the episodic supply of material through landsliding complicates quantifying the impact of the individual erosional mechanisms at the catchment scale. To address this, we combine the results of geomorphic mapping with measurements of cosmogenic 10Be, 26Al, and 14C concentrations in detrital quartz. The sediments were collected in a dense network of nested sub-catchments within the 12 km2-large Gürbe basin that is situated at the northern margin of the Central European Alps of Switzerland. The goal is to quantify the denudation rates, disentangle the contributions of the different erosional mechanisms (landsliding versus overland flow erosion) to the sedimentary budget of the study basin, and to trace the sedimentary material from source to sink. In the Gürbe basin, spatial erosion patterns derived from 10Be and 26Al concentrations indicate two distinct zones: the headwater zone with moderately steep hillslopes dominated by overland flow erosion, with high nuclide concentrations and low denudation rates (∼ 0.1 mm yr−1), and the steeper lower zone shaped by deep-seated landslides. Here lower concentrations correspond to higher denudation rates (up to 0.3 mm yr−1). In addition, 26Al / 10Be ratios in the upper zone align with the surface production ratio of these isotopes (6.75), which is consistent with sediment production through overland flow erosion. In the lower zone, higher 26Al / 10Be ratios of up to 8.8 point towards sediment contribution from greater depths, which characterises the landslide signal. The presence of a knickzone in the river channel at the border between the two zones points to the occurrence of a headward migrating erosional front and supports the interpretation that the basin is undergoing a long-term transient response to post-glacial topographic changes. In this context, erosion rates inferred from 10Be and 26Al isotopes are consistent, suggesting a near-steady, possibly self-organised sediment production regime over the past several thousand years. In such a regime, individual and stochastically operating landslides result in the generation of an aggregated signal that is recorded as a higher average denudation rate by the cosmogenic isotopes. Although in-situ 14C measurements were also conducted, the resulting concentrations are difficult to interpret as soil mixing (due to landsliding), sediment storage or an increase in erosion rates might influence the 14C concentration pattern in a yet non-predictable way.