This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Sometimes science throws up the unexpected. When a team of researchers set out to model river erosion in Canada's High Arctic, they did not expect the findings to defy common sense.
"We literally expected to see the opposite of what we ended up seeing," says Jonas Eschenfelder, a Ph.D. candidate in Simon Fraser University's School of Environmental Science. "We reran the experiments a whole bunch of times until my supervisor actually believed the results." For his supervisor, Shawn Chartrand, the findings ran counter to basic science. "We saw the results, we looked at each other, we said, 'This can't be correct,'" says Chartrand, an assistant professor in the School of Environmental Science.
"I emailed some colleagues. We ran a second experiment. Same outcome." Earth scientists have long believed that ice in riverbeds acts as a sort of glue, holding the landscape together and slowing erosion.
But when Chartrand noticed changes in the Arctic landscape during a 2019 visit, he began to wonder whether the conventional school of thought might be missing something. Against the backdrop of climate change and a rapidly warming Arctic, Chartrand's observations set in motion a body of work involving both SFU and University of British Columbia (UBC) scientists and students to investigate how erosion takes place when the ground freezes and thaws annually. Eschenfelder took up the mantle in summer 2024 and set about designing an experiment to simulate erosion rates in a frozen riverbed compared with one in a temperate climate.
In an underground lab deep beneath the Earth Science building at UBC, the team assembled a highly sophisticated system using cutting-edge technology and the latest AI monitoring tools. "Everything down there is essentially from Home Depot," says Eschenfelder. "We were able to build something that correctly shows how the Arctic and Arctic river systems are changing.
Then, to be able to combine it and actually travel to the Arctic and see those unique landscapes themselves is just a wonderful part of doing research." The lab stream, also known as a flume experiment, is a channel filled with glass beads representing the riverbed. Water flows over the beads, simulating river flow and the thawing process. The water disturbs the beads, which are picked up and flow out of the channel, where they are counted to calculate an erosion rate.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
