Degradation is ubiquitous and considerable even on short time scales of hundreds of years on steeply sloping landforms.
Even with these measures, uniformly and steeply sloped landforms, poorer soil chemical properties, combined with the unknown traits of the underlying spoil material, make the stability of most of these landforms uncertain.
The steeply sloped landforms, poor soil characteristics, depauperate native species pool, and uniform presence of exotic pasture grasses in the rehabilitation indicate that most of these newly created ecosystems should not be used for cattle grazing and also have few natural values.
Although our observations are limited to fault scarps and moraines, the results apply to any sloping unconsolidated landform in the western North America.
These results invalidate the prevailing assumption of no or little surface lowering on sloping unconsolidated landforms over the Quaternary Period and affirm that accurate interpretations of lichen ages and cosmogenically dated boulder ages require keen understanding of the ever-present erosion.
In our view, the most important results are twofold: 1) to show with a large data set that degradation affects universally all sloping unconsolidated landforms, and 2) to unambiguously show that even conservative estimates of the total lowering of the surface operate at time and depth scales that significantly interfere with cosmogenic exposure and lichen dating.
The stream water isotope values confirm the above findings by showing that, in the alluvial landforms soil water contributions are important during events and that direct surface runoff with little interaction of soil water occurs from the hill slope landforms during events.
This leads to dip slope landforms, with generally steeper East and North faces, and trellis drainage, where rivers and old glacial valleys followed the weaker layers in the geological succession.
The Wasatch Plateau is a steeply sloped, fault-block landform encompassing an area of 2477 kmostlysituateduaboveabove 3000 m in central Utah, USA.
Conceptual designs confirmed that the issues associated with steep slope topography, landform stability, and channel stability are valid, especially if minimizing the area of impact is a priority.
