<p>Individual, large thrusting earthquakes can cause hundreds to thousands of years of exhumation in a geologically instantaneous moment through landslide generation. The bedrock landslides generated are important weathering agents through the conversion of bedrock into mobile sediment. Despite this, records of surface uplift and exhumation at the orogen scale contain little to no evidence of individual large earthquakes. We examine how earthquakes influence exhumation rates by exploring how stochastic earthquakes and landslides affect surface uplift and exhumation in a zero-dimensional numerical model, supported by observations from the 2008 M<sub>w</sub>7.9 Wenchuan earthquake. Our model uses empirically constrained seismic, weathering, and landsliding scaling laws to show that large earthquakes generate the most surface uplift, despite causing exhumation of the bedrock surface. Where earthquakes, rather than aseismic processes predominantly drive rock uplift, rapid surface uplift can occur when regolith is preserved in the orogen, which limits the amount of bedrock weathering. By simulating the concentration of cosmogenic radionuclides within the model domain, we can examine the timescales over which earthquake-driven changes in exhumation can be measured. After an initial lowering in well-mixed landslide material, the concentration of <sup>10</sup>Be returns to the long-term average within 10<sup>3</sup> years. We further demonstrate that the variability in exhumation caused by earthquakes occurs at timescales shorter than the averaging time of most thermochronometers. When combined with evidence of signal shredding response within recent earthquakes, it seems unlikely for single earthquakes to affect long-term measurements of exhumation rates. Nevertheless, short term stochastic feedbacks between weathering and exhumation produce measurable increases in cosmogenically measured exhumation rates which can be linked to earthquakes.</p>