Project Goals

The Project has made much progress in elucidating the combined roles of tectonic uplift and geomorphic degradation. However, the project is far from complete and further research is underway. Currently, the project has several goals:

More landforms of the Carrizo Plain will be analyzed with the hillslope development model presented earlier in this project description (A Model For Geomorphic and Tectonic Displacements Applied to Hillslope Developement in Areas of Active Tectonics). It is hoped that the analysis of the Carrizo landforms will clarify the role of each element (tectonic displacement and geomorphic degradation) in the development of these landforms.

The project will develop techniques to integrate mechanical models of the area with the GIS database. This linkage will provide a means of correlating the numerical results of the model (ie. stress vectors) with attitudes, structure and geologic units of the area. It is hoped that this type of analysis will enhance intuition about how stress fields may resolve themselves in observed landforms.

The project will develop software that will allow many different types of media to be integrated into the GIS database. Software that will allow users to create isometric views and digitally shaded relief maps automatically with few parameters supplied will be developed.

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