Landscapes and Geomorphology: A Very Short Introduction

Citation

Goudie, A., & Viles, H. (2010). Landscapes and Geomorphology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. Very Short Introductions.

Chapter Summary

The book has nine short chapters in about 125 pages of text, followed by further reading and an index. It is not organised by landform type (rivers, glaciers, coasts and so on), as the broad textbooks in this course are. Instead it moves from what geomorphology is and how it developed, through the main controls on landscapes, to human impacts, the future, and the cultural value of landscape.

Chapter 1: The changing landscape

The opening chapter sets out the three main elements of geomorphology: landforms, Earth surface processes (exogenic processes acting from outside and endogenic processes from within), and the development of landscapes over time. It links the discipline to hydrology, ecology, climatology and human geography and describes a landscape as a palimpsest of interacting layers, shaped by rock, wind, ice, vegetation and people.

Chapter 2: The present is the key to the past

How can a landform's change over vast periods be understood? The chapter introduces early "landscape detectives" such as William Morris Davis, Louis Agassiz and Grove Karl Gilbert, and shows how they described landscapes, interpreted unfamiliar ones through what they knew, built theories and tested them, the four elements that still underpin landscape science. Their work is followed through three questions: how coral reefs develop, whether rivers are powerful agents of denudation, and what created the landscapes of the Alps. The publisher's description adds that Charles Darwin's overlooked research on landscape is discussed.

Chapter 3: Studying landscapes today

Twentieth-century ideas and methods take over: plate tectonics, Earth system science as a holistic view of land, atmosphere, water, ice, life and society, and the technologies of modern fieldwork, including differential GPS, ground-based LIDAR, ground-penetrating radar, and radiocarbon, radiometric and cosmogenic dating.

Chapter 4: Landscapes, tectonics, and climate

The chapter treats tectonics and climate as the two biggest influences on how landscapes look. It notes how much plate tectonic theory, accepted in the 1960s, has explained, from mountain building to the creation of oceans, and shows how climate change acts on very different timescales, from glacial retreat since 20,000 years ago through the Little Ice Age (about 1500–1850) to the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Chapter 5: Living landscapes

Here the relationship runs both ways: landforms and climate shape vegetation and animals, and plants and animals create and modify landforms, speeding up or slowing down Earth surface processes. Beaver dams in the United States, which alter river flows and habitats, are a central example, and the chapter argues that this research helps manage environments and biodiversity.

Chapter 6: Landscapes and us

The chapter looks at human impacts over roughly the last 300 years, the period sometimes called the Anthropocene. It asks which features humans produce directly, which natural processes they accelerate, how human and natural effects can be told apart, and how geomorphological hazards affect people, ending with how hazard mapping and engineering can reduce harm.

Chapter 7: Landscapes of the future

Predicting future landscapes means weighing climate change, tectonic activity and human impacts. The chapter introduces positive and negative feedbacks and identifies geomorphically sensitive places, notably thawing permafrost and low-lying coasts exposed to sea-level rise, which are home to around 1.2 billion people.

Chapter 8: Landscapes, art, and culture

According to the publisher's description, the book concludes with the cultural importance of landscape and the way this has led to the conservation of "earth heritage".

Chapter 9: Unseen landscapes

The final chapter, titled "Unseen landscapes", completes the book before the guide to further reading.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–3: The changing landscape; The present is the key to the past; Studying landscapes today

• Landforms, processes and landscape development: the three elements that together define geomorphology.
• Exogenic and endogenic processes: surface processes driven from outside (weather, water, ice, wind) versus those driven from within the Earth.
• Palimpsest: a landscape as layers of features from different times that overlap and interact.
• Earth system science: the study of the Earth as a single system linking land, atmosphere, water, ice, life and society.

Chapters 4–5: Landscapes, tectonics, and climate; Living landscapes

• Plate tectonics: the theory that explains mountain building, the formation of ocean basins and volcanic activity.
• Timescales of climate change: changes ranging from glacial cycles over millennia to decade-scale events such as the Dust Bowl.
• Living landscapes: the two-way relationship in which plants and animals both respond to landforms and create or modify them, illustrated by beaver dams.

Chapters 6–7: Landscapes and us; Landscapes of the future

• Anthropocene: the period of strong human influence on the Earth, dated here from the Industrial Revolution.
• Geomorphological hazards: landscape processes, such as landslides, that threaten people and can be mapped and mitigated.
• Feedbacks: processes that amplify (positive) or dampen (negative) change and complicate predictions.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Geomorphology as a science with a history. A whole chapter shows how early investigators reasoned from present processes to past landscapes, and the description stresses figures such as Darwin; this gives readers a sense of method, not just a catalogue of landforms.
• Modern methods. The chapter on studying landscapes covers the field and dating techniques (differential GPS, LIDAR, ground-penetrating radar, cosmogenic dating) that students will meet in practical classes.
• Broad framing. Chapters on living landscapes, human impacts, future change and culture connect geomorphology to ecology, hazards, climate change and heritage, and the examples range across the world, with New Zealand, the Tibetan Plateau and Middle Eastern deserts named by the publisher.

Limitations

• No systematic treatment of landform types. There are no chapters on rivers, glaciers, slopes, coasts or deserts as such; students who need process-by-process explanations need a textbook.
• Qualitative overview. Nothing in the contents or the chapter descriptions points to a quantitative treatment of processes; the physics of sediment transport or slope stability has to come from the course's quantitative texts.
• From 2010. The book reflects research up to the late 2000s, and no revised edition is listed.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is the quickest overview of geomorphology in the course list, best read at the very start or before choosing geomorphology options. Huggett and Shuttleworth's Fundamentals of Geomorphology and Bierman and Montgomery's Key Concepts in Geomorphology are the broad undergraduate textbooks that follow: Huggett and Shuttleworth treat tectonic, weathering, fluvial, glacial, aeolian and coastal systems in turn, while Bierman and Montgomery introduce the tools used to measure, date and model landscapes before working through each process domain, picking up where Goudie and Viles's chapter on modern methods leaves off. Anderson and Anderson's Geomorphology: The Mechanics and Chemistry of Landscapes supplies the quantitative, process-physics treatment that this book does not attempt.

On the hydrology side, Hendriks's Introduction to Physical Hydrology and Dingman's Physical Hydrology explain the water processes that drive much of the landscape change described here; reading Goudie and Viles first gives the wider context in which those processes matter.

How to Use This Book

The book needs no background and suits first-year geography or earth science students, students from other disciplines, and anyone choosing between physical geography options.

• Read Chapters 1–3 as a unit. They define the field, show how its reasoning developed and introduce the modern toolkit; later chapters build on them.
• Read Chapters 4–7 alongside a textbook. Each corresponds to topics treated at greater length in the course textbooks: tectonics and climate, plants and animals as landscape agents, human impacts and hazards, and climate-change sensitivity.
• Use Chapter 8 for discussion. Its theme, the cultural value of landscape and the conservation of earth heritage, suits a seminar on why particular landscapes are protected; Chapter 9 then closes the book.
• Follow up the further reading at the end of the book, and look at the examples (beaver dams, permafrost thaw, coastal sea-level rise) in current sources to see how the issues have developed since 2010.