Dr. Kristen Cook of the Department of Geosciences enjoyed the honor of having her article "River gorge eradication by downstream sweep erosion" published in the prestigious international journal Nature Geoscience in August.

In 2009, Dr. Cook began working with the support of NTU and the Ministry of Science and Technology to observe and measure in precise detail the topological transformations of the bedrock gorge of the Daan River in Miaoli County. She discovered that the 1,200-meter-long gorge, known as the Grand Canyon since its formation following the Jiji Earthquake of 1999, is being eroded by regular typhoons and floods each year and that it is disappearing at the extremely rapid rate of 17 meters per year on average.

At this rate, the gorge is expected to disappear and return to its original state prior to the earthquake, that of a broad floodplain, within just a few decades. This effect explains why there remain no observable traces in the area of the earthquakes that occurred before the 1999 Earthquake.More significantly, the rate at which the gorge is disappearing is also 10 times faster than any previously recorded similar events known to human observation.

Dr. Cook joined the Daan gorge research team led by Distinguished Chair Research Professor John Suppe after arriving at the Department of Geosciences in 2008. Her outstanding work on the Daan River gorge stands as her greatest research accomplishment from her time at NTU. After taking up employment at the German Research Center for Geosciences in 2013, Dr. Cook joined colleagues from that research center and the Swiss Federal Research Institute in preparing her Daan River gorge research for joint publication in Nature Geoscience.

Dr. Cook's Nature Geoscience article drew a great deal of attention from the international media. She was quoted in a BBC News article as saying, "The really cool thing about this place is that it's happening so fast, we can watch it. We can see processes that you can't reconstruct."

In addition to the gorge's gradual widening, Dr. Cook found that more significant erosion is occurring at the upper entrance to the canyon. During flooding, water from the wide upstream floodplain rushes into the narrow gorge, causing violent erosion. Over the last few years, the gorge's entrance has been pushed forward nearly 90 meters.The most significant aspect of the unique phenomenon in Taiwan is that it makes it possible for scientists to observe such geographic movementswithin timeframes that would have been impossible in other similar topographic landscapes.