Abstract

The number of people who have contributed to this work in some fashion is overwhelming, my apologies in advance if I have forgotten to recognize them all. First, I would like to extend a thank you to my committee members for their time and efforts: Wiki Royden, Clark Burchfiel, Kelin Whipple, Martha House, and Kip Hodges. Thank you to Wiki Royden for being the best advisor I could have ever asked for. I am grateful to her for giving me the freedom to work independently and to pursue my own ideas at the same time providing the encouragement, mentoring, and advice (scientific and otherwise!) needed to develop those ideas into solid scientific projects. Her grasp of the bigger picture will never cease to amaze me. But most of all, she has been a lot of fun to work with and I hope to have the chance to work with her again someday. Thank you to Clark Burchfiel for providing valuable advice, encouragement and helping to tie together the geomorphology and crustal dynamics with the fathomless, complicated geologic record of eastern Tibet. It has been a remarkable experience to work in the field (and in the lab over maps!) with Clark. Thank you to Kelin Whipple for pushing me to provide as many quantitative details as possible in order to ground my qualitative, arm-waving ideas about landscape development. His input has been essential for trying to bring together a big-picture tectonic view