Dynamic geomorphology: historical convergence towards modern practice

Abstract

AbstractGeomorphology, the study of landforms and the processes that shape them, emerged in its modern form in the mid-twentieth century and continues to change. Its practice, however, derives from the convergence of discrete foundations in the Earth, water and applied sciences over the past 400 years, underpinned by advances in analysis and technology. The Earth-science foundation was built as early geologists sought to explain landforms as expressions of underlying rocks or as surrogates for vanished stratigraphies. This approach, more speculative than definitive, rarely explained the processes at work. The water and applied sciences were more discerning but only slowly came to be integrated into morphodynamic explanations. All three foundations, initially vague on time and space, emerged during the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century and were refined during the agrarian and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before converging into modern practice during the electronic age of the twentieth century.