Landform

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This conical hill in Salar de Arizaro, Salta, Argentina called Cono de Arita constitutes a landform.

A landform is a natural or anthropogenic

ocean basins
.

Physical characteristics

Landforms are categorized by characteristic physical attributes such as elevation, slope, orientation, structure

waterbodies and sub-surface features. Mountains, hills, plateaux, and plains are the four major types of landforms. Minor landforms include buttes
, canyons, valleys, and basins. Tectonic plate movement under the Earth can create landforms by pushing up mountains and hills.

Panorama of Great Smoky Mountains National Park showing physical features of a rolling plain, actually part of a broad valley, distant foothills, and a backdrop of the old, much weathered Appalachian mountain range

Hierarchy of classes

Lijiang River, Guilin, China
Landforms by Order
Order Landforms
First Continents and Oceans
Second Mountains, Plains, Plateaus
Third Valleys, Peaks, Waterfalls, Sand Dunes, Gokhur Lake, etc.

Landform elements are parts of a high-order landforms that can be further identified and systematically given a cohesive definition such as hill-tops, shoulders, saddles
, foreslopes and backslopes.

Some generic landform elements including: pits, peaks, channels, ridges, passes, pools and plains.

different techniques are used to describe relief, including contour lines and triangulated irregular networks
.

Elementary landforms (segments, facets, relief units) are the smallest homogeneous divisions of the land surface, at the given scale/resolution. These are areas with relatively homogeneous

morphometric
properties, bounded by lines of discontinuity. A plateau or a hill can be observed at various scales, ranging from a few hundred meters to hundreds of kilometers. Hence, the spatial distribution of landforms is often scale-dependent, as is the case for soils and geological strata.

A number of factors, ranging from

algae in the formation of coral reefs
.

Landforms do not include several man-made features, such as

terrestrial planets
.

The scientific study of landforms is known as geomorphology.

In

toponyms (geographical proper names) of individual landform objects (mountains, hills, valleys, etc.) are called oronyms.[4]

Recent developments

Landforms may be extracted from a

LIDAR
techniques.

See also

References

  1. S2CID 251582329
    .
  2. , retrieved 2022-08-12
  3. ^ "Landform". National Geographic. Archived from the original on 11 October 2023.
  4. ^ Room 1996, p. 75.
  5. ^ Robert A. MacMillan; David H. McNabb; R. Keith Jones (September 2000). "Conference paper: "Automated landform classification using DEMs"". Retrieved 2008-06-26.

Igstar, cxvellie (2017), Howard, Jeffrey (ed.), "Anthropogenic Landforms and Soil Parent Materials", Anthropogenic Soils, Progress in Soil Science, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 25–51, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-54331-4_3, ISBN 978-3-319-54331-4, retrieved 2022-08-12

Sources

Further reading

External links