This book of phenomenal illustrations provides a wealth of visual information on the wide variety of landform processes over all latitudes, climates and geological time-scales. It invites you to observe the surface of planet Earth, to appreciate its astonishing beauty and to explore scientific explanations for the form of our landscapes. 250 full-colour images from Google Earth enable all types of terrestrial environments and landforms to be appreciated at a glance. Images are explained with scales, coordinates, explanatory text and references, making the landform processes active on our globe easy for the reader to comprehend. See the effects of both sudden and slow forming agents such as the impact of a comet or meteorite, and erosion and deposition processes through wind, flowing water, creeping glacier ice, or frost in the ground. Appreciate how landscapes are shaped by processes such as weathering, transport and erosion and how that erosion enables us to look into endogenic processes (those within the Earth s crust), called tectonics. These images and the processes that they document show that continents are shifting, mountains are uplifting, and ocean bottoms may sink deeper. This collection will appeal to everyone: researchers, students and non-experts alike can take inspiration from these images, which bring the landforms of the world to life. The scientific discipline of geomorphology becomes accessible through the fascinating insights that these clear, well explained images allow.

Contenu

Part I - Introduction.- 1. Shaping the Surface of Earth - Geomorphology in a Nutshell.-art II - Endogenic Forms and Processes.- Volcanic Landforms.- Igneous Intrusive Landforms.- Tectonic Landforms.-art III - Exogenic Forms and Processes.-5. Impacts Craters.- Physical and Chemical Weathering.-7. Karst landscapes - topographies sculptured by dissolution of rock.- 8. Mass Movements - landforms shaped under the force of gravity.- 9. Forms by Flowing Water (Fluvial Features).- 10. Planar Forms and Plain Forming Processes: Pediments/Glacis, and Peneplains (with Inselbergs).- 11. Forms by Wind (or: Aeolian Processes): Deflation and Dunes.- 12. Glacier Ice and its Domain.-. Frost and Permafrost as Morphological Agents (or: the Periglacial Domain).- Part IV - Epilogue - Transformation of the Earth Surface by Man (Anthropogenic Forms).- Index.