Landscapes And Geomorphism

The book I read to research this post was Landscapes & Geomorphism A Very Short Introduction by Andrew Goudie et al which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book covers a wide variety of landscapes and events such as the dust bowl in America in the 30's to the glaciers in New Zealand to the coral reefs of the Pacific & even the low lying landscape of the hills around London. Darwin on his voyage on The Beagle became the world's leading authority on Landscapes and wrote much about it in addition to his work on evolution. His work on coral reefs still holds true despite many other's theories being superceded by the discovery of plate tectonics. One of the most interesting landscapes geologically is South Island in New Zealand where the Pacific Plate meets the Indian Plate and has resulted in the upheaval of the Southern Alps along with the huge glaciers due to the huge amount of rainfall. 1/4 of the world is permafrost including 50% of Canada & 85% of Alaska. One of the most massive upheavals is the Himalayas Kakoram Mountains where an area half the size of the United States is almost entirely above 4,000 metres and contains almost every mountain over 7,000 metres in the world. Much of the aging of rock is done by dating the radioactivity of the quartz found in it as due to its great age it generally difficult to date it by other means. I enjoyed reading this book which I'm sure you can see is very interesting.