ABSTRACT
The changes which have taken place in geomorphology since the Second World War have been profound. This profundity does not lie so much in the flood of new factual information about the surface of the earth, its processes and its transformations, as in our basic attitudes to the subject as a whole. However, the new mass data-generation methods of remote terrain sensing (e.g. air photography, infra-red photography, airborne radar, as well as other sophisticated military techniques linked with satellites) (McCauley, 1964; Ellermeier and Simonett, 1965; Heacock et ai, 1966; Latham, 1966; Moore, 1966; O'ffice of Naval Research, 1966; Rouse et ai, 1966; Rowan and McCauley, 1966; Simpson, 1966), combined with computer methods of data processing and information extraction (Krumbein and Graybill, 1965, Chaps. 13-15), are also beginning to impose the need for radical methodological and conceptual rethinking in geomorphology. Indeed, it may be asked legitimately whether the study of landforms still exists as a discrete scholarly entity, for the most important recent changes in the subject have tended to impress upon scholars the disparate character of modern researches, together with the inability of workers to identify broad common objectives of even the most general character, or even to communicate to one another their mutual objections. Although geomorphology has always been a discipline of fine diversity (Chorley, Dunn and Beckinsale, 1964), many scholars now feel that the decline in the popularity of the Davisian basis for the subject (Chorley, 1965) has produced a conceptual vacuum which has not yet been reoccupied by any comparably broad systematic approach. This deficiency has served to highlight many national preoccupations, some of long standing, with particular geomorphic objectives. Thus the development of the American style of 'dynamic-process' geomorphology, the Franco-German climatic geomorphology, the British denudation chronologyjgeological approach, the Polish Pleistocene-dominated geomorphology, the Russian applied geomorphology, the Swedish studies of process almost per se, the Eastern European morphological mapping, and the Central European tectonic bases have created a
IN Godot-like atmosphere of articulate introspection. Perhaps this is why many geomorphologists have become increasingly concerned with the basic structure of the subject (e.g. Strahler, 1952; Dylik, 1957; Chorley, 1962 and 1966; Schumm and Lichty, 1965 ; Howard, 1965), and the relationships of its parts. The present volume, with its theme of model building, seems to provide both an opportunity and a kindly environment for taking such a broad structural view of the subject.
