ABSTRACT
Geomorphologists have a long tradition of interest in climate processes and awareness of their significance for landscape developments. Formal recognition of the role of exogenic processes, particularly climatic conditions, in shaping landscapes can be traced at least to the beginning of this century in the writings of William Morris Davis (1899), Albrecht Penck (1910) and Emmanuel de Martonne (1913). Davis distinguished the ‘normal’ temperate fluvial cycle of rivers and subsequently the glacial and arid ‘climatic accidents’, a tripartite division followed by Penck and many subsequent geomorphologists. Penck noted that the moisture budget (precipitation ≶ evaporation; snowfall ≶ablation) accounted for the type of hydrological control, but he provided no link to surface morphology. In an attempt to develop a systematic basis for climatic geomorphology, Büdel (1948) identified eight morphoclimatic zones categorised, for example, by frost debris, temperate mature soils with and without permafrost, desert debris, sheetwash and tropical mature soils. Peltier (1950) elaborated the conceptual foundation for climatic geomorphology. Nine morphogenetic regions, based only on annual temperature and precipitation, were suggested and inferred relative intensities of weathering, frost action, mass movement, wind action and fluvial erosion were graphed in relation to these two climate variables. The limitations of this two-variable approach were readily pointed out by geomorphologists (see Stoddart 1969b) and a revised scheme was subsequently put forward (Peltier 1975).
