The generation and degradation of marine terraces

Marine terraces are ephemeral planar landforms. While tectonic and climatic forcings responsible for the generation of existing marine terraces have operated for at least 1 Myr, terraces have been completely removed by erosion above a given altitude (and hence above a given age). Above this altitude, the landscape has forgotten that it was once terraced. We ask what controls this characteristic time-scale, which we term the ‘forget time’, in a landscape. We approach the problem with simple scaling arguments, and 1-D numerical models of landscape