What rivers can tell us about the earth's history | Liz Hajek

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 July 2017

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

Rivers are one of nature's most powerful forces -- they bulldoze mountains and carve up the earth, and their courses are constantly moving. Understanding how they form and how they'll change is important for those that call their banks and deltas home. In this visual-packed talk, geoscientist Liz Hajek shows us how rocks deposited by ancient rivers can be used as a time machine to study the earth's history, so we can figure out how to more sustainably live on it today.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features geoscientist Liz Hajick, recorded live at TEDxPSU 2014.
0:09.0	All right, Liz, get up our picture of the Earth. The Earth is pretty awesome. I'm a geologist, so I get pretty psyched about this. But the Earth is great. It's powerful, it's dynamic, it's constantly changing.
0:21.6	It's a pretty exciting place to live.
0:23.6	But I want to share with you guys today my perspective as a geologist
0:28.6	in how understanding Earth's past can help inform and guide decisions
0:32.6	that we make today about how to sustainably live on Earth's surface. So there's a lot of exciting things that go on on the surface of the Earth.
0:41.3	If we zoom in here a little bit,
0:43.3	I want to talk to you guys a little bit about one of the things that happens
0:46.3	is material gets shuffled around Earth's surface all the time,
0:49.3	and one of the big things that happens is material from high mountains
0:52.3	gets eroded and transported and deposited in the sea.
0:56.0	And this process is ongoing all the time, and it has huge effects on how the landscape works.
1:01.0	So this example here in South India, we have some of the biggest mountains in the world,
1:05.0	and you can see in this satellite photo, rivers transporting material from those mountains out to the sea. You can think of these rivers
1:12.3	like bulldozers. They're basically taking these mountains and pushing them down towards the sea.
1:18.0	I'll give you guys an example here, right? So we zoom in a little bit. I want to talk to you guys
1:21.8	specifically about a river. You can see these beautiful patterns that the rivers make as they're
1:26.3	pushing material down to the sea.
1:28.3	But these patterns aren't static.
1:30.3	These rivers are wiggling and jumping around quite a bit,
1:32.3	and it can have big impacts on our lives.
1:34.3	So an example of this is the Kosi River.
	...

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