The setting of weak shales underlying heavily fractured sandstone caprock, coupled with the wet environmental conditions along the valley slopes of the Rough River Basin in north-central Kentucky, has led to massive rockfalls composed of clusters of sandstone boulders. However, the exact mechanisms of cliff retreat and sediment accumulation due to mass movement in that region remained unclear. In addition, the frequency and timing of these mass movement events are uncertain. To better understand mass movement mechanisms, we used the Schmidt Hammer exposure dating (SHED) technique and terrestrial cosmogenic nuclide dating on two sites in the Rough River basin, “Home Tucker” and “Linda Paul.” The results suggest that the degradation mechanism of sandstone cliffs by mass movement varies due to local geology and climate change. The Home Tucker site exhibits boulder accumulation through rockfall during the Early Holocene (10.6 ± 1.0 to 43.9 ± 3.0 ka), precluding the estimation of a cliff retreat rate. In contrast, the Linda Paul site exhibits block sliding and toppling, with detachment events spanning from 21 ± 1.6 to 66.8 ± 5.4 ka, and an estimated cliff retreat rate of 0.17 ± 0.09 mm/yr for Home Tucker site and 0.22 ± 0.1 mm/yr for the Linda Paul site. These findings suggest that detachment events occurred more frequently during the last glacial maximum, likely due to freeze-thaw processes or rapid climate change. With only one boulder dated to the Holocene, warming and a relatively stable climate during the Holocene have likely slowed cliff degradation. Attempts to develop a reliable SHED calibration curve were hindered by no correlation (r2 = 0.1) between 10Be age and SHED rebound measurement. This lack of correlation is likely due to variable vegetation cover, moisture inconsistencies, temporally non-linear and spatially heterogeneous weathering of quartz arenite, inheritance of weathering from before rock fall, and bed-dependent variations in strength.
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