ABSTRACT

The term climatic geomorphology was introduced by Martonne (1913) and, as elaborated by Holzner and Weaver (1965), has come to imply that the geomorphologically significant processes associated with a number of distinctive world climatic belts are capable of producing in each belt over a prolonged period a characteristic and distinctive assemblage of landforms. These belts have been termed morphoclimatic by Büdel (1948a, b) (see also Formkreisen (Büdel 1944)), in contrast to the smaller-scale and geologically controlled morphostructural regions (Cholley 1950). A second aspect of climatic geomorphology, and one which has grown in relative importance during the twentieth century, is based on the assumption that landform assemblages exhibit features resulting from a succession of past (or ‘fossil’) climates such that, in an extreme interpretation, ‘we should find in the morphology of a region traces of as many systems of erosion as it has experienced climates, and even traces of the passage of one system or climate to another’ (Cholley 1950). The broad landform regions so defined have been termed morphogenetic (Cotton 1958) or climatogenetic (Büdel 1963); see also Formkreisen (Büdel 1944, 1948b).