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An early popular geomorphic model was the geographical cycle or cycle of erosion model of broad-scale landscape evolution developed by William Morris Davis between 1884 and 1899. [11] It was an elaboration of the uniformitarianism theory that had first been proposed by James Hutton (1726–1797). [ 24 ]
Mass wasting is a general term for any process of erosion that is driven by gravity and in which the transported soil and rock is not entrained in a moving medium, such as water, wind, or ice. [2] The presence of water usually aids mass wasting, but the water is not abundant enough to be regarded as a transporting medium.
Organisms affect geomorphic processes in a variety of ways. For example, trees can reduce landslide potential where their roots penetrate to underlying rock, plants and their litter inhibit soil erosion, biochemicals produced by plants accelerate the chemical weathering of bedrock and regolith, and marine animals cause the bioerosion of coral.
Denudation is the geological process in which moving water, ice, wind, and waves erode the Earth's surface, leading to a reduction in elevation and in relief of landforms and landscapes.
Understanding the principle of isostasy is a key element to understanding the interactions and feedbacks shared between erosion and tectonics. The principle of isostasy states that when free to move vertically, lithosphere floats at an appropriate level in the asthenosphere so that the pressure at a depth of compensation in the asthenosphere well below the base of the lithosphere is the same. [3]
The original soil surface is buried, and the formation process must begin anew for this deposit. Over time the soil will develop a profile that depends on the intensities of biota and climate. While a soil can achieve relative stability of its properties for extended periods, [ 117 ] the soil life cycle ultimately ends in soil conditions that ...
Dendritic drainage: the Yarlung Tsangpo River, Tibet, seen from space: snow cover has melted in the valley system.. In geomorphology, drainage systems, also known as river systems, are the patterns formed by the streams, rivers, and lakes in a particular drainage basin.
The Vasquez Rock formations, located in the Sierra Pelona Mountains, were formed by tectonic activity along an offshoot of the San Andreas Fault.. Morphotectonics (from Ancient Greek: μορφή, morphḗ, "form"; [1] and τεκτονικός, tektonikos, "pertaining to building" [2]), or tectonic geomorphology, is a branch of geomorphology that studies how landforms are formed or affected by ...