Stephen E. Watkins

GM Geomorphology

The 2018 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Stephen E. Watkins for the poster/PICO entitled:

Quantifying sediment dynamics and intermittency of gravel bed rivers across the Corinth Rift, central Greece (Watkins, S. E.; Whittaker, A. C.; Ganti, V.; Bell, R. E.; Brooke, S. A. S.; Gawthorpe, R. L.; McNeill, L. C.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Stephen E. Watkins is a PhD student at Imperial College London (U.K.), supervised by Dr Alexander C. Whittaker, Dr Rebecca E. Bell, Professor Lisa C. McNeill (University of Southampton, U.K.) & Professor Robert L. Gawthorpe (University of Bergen, Norway). In addition this work presented here is also the collaboration with Dr Vamsi Ganti (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA) and Sam A.S. Brooke (Imperial College London, U.K.).
Stephen’s PhD project overarching aims are to better understand the sensitivity of landscapes to external forcings such as tectonics and climate and whether stratigraphy reflects this, using the Corinth Rift, central Greece as a natural laboratory. The EGU 2018 Poster presents the results of fieldwork where 47 gravel-bed rivers were sieved at their mouths (approximately 3 tonnes of sediment was sieved). With this dataset the authors calculated the intermittency of the rivers (how fast can the rivers export their bedload sediment budget on a millennial timescale) and find that the gravel-bed rivers of central Greece have an intermittency of 0.0014 which means that they transport bedload for just 0.14% of the time for millennial timescales. In relative terms this means that these rivers can export their annual bedload sediment budget in 12 hours. This therefore shows how ‘flashy’ the rivers in Greece are and highlights how the transport of bedload occurs predominantly in high-discharge events, which occur less frequently.