1.
Badlands
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Badlands are a type of dry terrain where softer sedimentary rocks and clay-rich soils have been extensively eroded by wind and water. They are characterized by steep slopes, minimal vegetation, lack of a substantial regolith and they can resemble malpaís, a terrain of volcanic rock. Canyons, ravines, gullies, buttes, mesas, hoodoos and they are often difficult to navigate by foot. Badlands often have a color display that alternates from dark black/blue coal stria to be bright clays to red scoria. Badlands are partially characterized by their thin to nonexistent regolith layers, the regolith profiles of badlands in arid climates are likely to resemble one another. In these regions, the layer is typically composed of silt, shale. This layer can form either a compact crust or a looser, Badlands such as those found in the Mancos Shale, the Brule Formation, the Chadron Formation, and the Dinosaur Provincial Park can be generally said to fit this profile. In less arid regions, however, the regolith profile can vary considerably, some badlands have no regolith layer whatsoever, capping instead in bare rock such as sandstone. Others have a regolith with a clay veneer, and still others have a biological crust of algae or lichens, in addition to lacking significant regolith, they also lack much vegetation. The lack of vegetation could very well be a result of the lack of a substantial regolith, the formation of badlands is a result of two processes, deposition and erosion. The process of deposition describes the accumulation, over time, of layers of mineral material, different environments such as seas, rivers, or tropical zones, deposit different sorts of clays, silts, and sand. Once the deposited sediments have solidified, the material becomes subject to erosion. It is sometimes taught that badlands erode at a steady rate of about 1 inch per year. In actuality, the processes by which the erosion responses take place vary depending on the precise interbedding of the sedimentary material. In 2010, researchers at Badlands National Park initiated a 3-year project to learn more about the erosion rate of the specific badlands found in that park. Some of the best-known badland formations can be found in Canada, in the U. S. Makoshika State Park in Montana and Badlands National Park in South Dakota together form a series of extensive badland formations. Among the Henry Mountains area, about 1500m above sea level, Cretaceous, another popular area of badland formations is Toadstool Geologic Park in the Oglala National Grassland of northwestern Nebraska. Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado and Utah are also badlands settings, a small badland called Hells Half-Acre is present in Natrona County, Wyoming
2.
Shale
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Shale is a fine-grained, clastic sedimentary rock composed of mud that is a mix of flakes of clay minerals and tiny fragments of other minerals, especially quartz and calcite. The ratio of clay to other minerals is variable, shale is characterized by breaks along thin laminae or parallel layering or bedding less than one centimeter in thickness, called fissility. Mudstones, on the hand, are similar in composition. Before the mid 19th century, the slate, shale. In the context of underground mining, shale was frequently referred to as slate well into the 20th century. Non-fissile rocks of similar composition but made of smaller than 0.06 mm are described as mudstones or claystone. Rocks with similar sizes but with less clay and therefore grittier are siltstones. Shale is the most common sedimentary rock, shales are typically composed of variable amounts of clay minerals and quartz grains and the typical color is gray. Addition of variable amounts of minor constituents alters the color of the rock, black shale results from the presence of greater than one percent carbonaceous material and indicates a reducing environment. Black shale can also be referred to as black metal, red, brown and green colors are indicative of ferric oxide, iron hydroxide, or micaceous minerals. Clays are the constituent of shales and other mudrocks. The clay minerals represented are largely kaolinite, montmorillonite and illite, clay minerals of Late Tertiary mudstones are expandable smectites whereas in older rocks especially in mid- to early Paleozoic shales illites predominate. The transformation of smectite to illite produces silica, sodium, calcium, magnesium, iron and these released elements form authigenic quartz, chert, calcite, dolomite, ankerite, hematite and albite, all trace to minor minerals found in shales and other mudrocks. Shales and mudrocks contain roughly 95 percent of the matter in all sedimentary rocks. However, this amounts to less than one percent by mass in an average shale, black shales, which form in anoxic conditions, contain reduced free carbon along with ferrous iron and sulfur. Pyrite and amorphous iron sulfide along with carbon produce the black coloration, the process in the rock cycle which forms shale is called compaction. The fine particles that compose shale can remain suspended in long after the larger particles of sand have deposited. Shales are typically deposited in very slow moving water and are found in lakes and lagoonal deposits, in river deltas, on floodplains
3.
Fremont River (Utah)
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The river is 95 miles long. The Johnson Valley Reservoir is fed by Sevenmile Creek and Lake Creek, the Fremont River passes through Fremont, Loa, Lyman, Bicknell, Teasdale, and Torrey and provides year round irrigation for the agricultural lands of Rabbit Valley and Caineville. Then it heads through Hanksville and afterwards to its mouth, the Fremont River has a drainage area of 751 square miles fed by spring snowmelt off Thousand Lake Mountain, Boulder Mountain, and the northern Henry Mountains. The river is named after John Charles Fremont and it gives its name to the Fremont culture, a Precolumbian archaeological culture. Flow, by month, at Bicknell gauging station, List of Utah rivers List of tributaries of the Colorado River Watershed Map U. S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System, Fremont River
4.
Grove Karl Gilbert
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Grove Karl Gilbert, known by the abbreviated name G. K. Gilbert in academic literature, was an American geologist. Gilbert was born in Rochester, New York and graduated from the University of Rochester, in 1871, he joined George M. Wheelers geographical survey as its first geologist. He then joined the Powell Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region in 1874, becoming Powells primary assistant, during this time he published an important monograph, The Geology of the Henry Mountains. After the creation of the U. S. Geological Survey in 1879, he was appointed to the position of Senior Geologist, Gilbert published a study of the former ancient Lake Bonneville in 1890, of which the Great Salt Lake is a remnant. He named that lake after the army captain Benjamin L. E. de Bonneville, the type of river delta that Gilbert described at this location has since become known to geomorphologists as a Gilbert delta. In 1891, Gilbert examined the origins for a crater in Arizona, now known as Meteor Crater. For a number of reasons, and against his intuition, he concluded it was the result of a steam explosion rather than an impact of a meteorite. Gilberts calculations showed that the volume of the crater and the debris on the rim were roughly equal, further there were no magnetic anomalies. Gilbert argued that the fragments found on the rim were just coincidence. Gilbert would publicize these conclusions in a series of lectures in 1895, subsequent investigations would reveal that it was in fact a meteor crater, but that interpretation was not well established until the mid-20th century. The interpretation of lunar craters as of impact origin was also debated until the mid-20th century and he joined the Harriman Alaska Expedition in 1899. Two weeks after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Gilbert took a series of photographs documenting the damage along the San Andreas fault from Inverness to Bolinas. Gilbert is considered one of the giants of the sub-discipline of geomorphology, having contributed to the understanding of evolution, erosion. Gilbert was a science pioneer, correctly identifying lunar craters as caused by impacts. Gilbert was one of the influential early American geologists. He won the Wollaston Medal from the Geological Society of London in 1900 and he was awarded the Charles P. Daly Medal by the American Geographical Society in 1910. Gilbert was well-esteemed by all American geologists during his lifetime, because of Gilberts prescient insights into planetary geology, the Geological Society of America created the G. K. Gilbert Award for planetary geology in 1983. Gilberts wide-ranging scientific ideas were so profound that the Geological Society of America published GSA Special Paper 183 on his research, craters on the Moon and on Mars are named in his honor
5.
Ancient Greek
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Ancient Greek includes the forms of Greek used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around the 9th century BC to the 6th century AD. It is often divided into the Archaic period, Classical period. It is antedated in the second millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Hellenistic phase is known as Koine. Koine is regarded as a historical stage of its own, although in its earliest form it closely resembled Attic Greek. Prior to the Koine period, Greek of the classic and earlier periods included several regional dialects, Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers. It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance. This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical phases of the language, Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language, divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic, Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, some dialects are found in standardized literary forms used in literature, while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms, homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek used in the epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic, the origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period and they have the same general outline, but differ in some of the detail. The invasion would not be Dorian unless the invaders had some relationship to the historical Dorians. The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, the Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people—Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians, each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Often non-west is called East Greek, Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric, Southern Peloponnesus Doric, and Northern Peloponnesus Doric. The Lesbian dialect was Aeolic Greek and this dialect slowly replaced most of the older dialects, although Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language, which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek, by about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosized into Medieval Greek
6.
Logos
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Logos is the logic behind an argument. Logos tries to persuade an audience using logical arguments and supportive evidence, Logos is a persuasive technique often used in writing and rhetoric. Ancient Greek philosophers used the term in different ways, the sophists used the term to mean discourse, and Aristotle applied the term to refer to reasoned discourse or the argument in the field of rhetoric. The Stoic philosophers identified the term with the animating principle pervading the Universe. Under Hellenistic Judaism, Philo adopted the term into Jewish philosophy, the Gospel of John identifies the Logos, through which all things are made, as divine, and further identifies Jesus Christ as the incarnate Logos. Despite the conventional translation as word, it is not used for a word in the sense, instead. However, both logos and lexis derive from the same verb legō, meaning count, tell, say, jeanne Fahnestock describes logos as a premise. She states that, to find the reason behind a rhetors backing of a position or stance. The rhetors success, she argues, will come down to objects of agreement. between arguer and audience. Logos is logical appeal, and the logic is derived from it. It is normally used to describe facts and figures that support the speakers topic, furthermore, logos is credited with appealing to the audiences sense of logic, with the definition of “logic” being concerned with the thing as it is known. Philo distinguished between logos prophorikos and the logos endiathetos, the Stoics also spoke of the logos spermatikos, which is not important in the Biblical tradition but is relevant in Neoplatonism. Early translators from Greek, such as Jerome in the 4th century, were frustrated by the inadequacy of any single Latin word to convey the Logos expressed in the Gospel of John. The Vulgate Bible usage of in principio erat verbum was thus constrained to use the noun verbum for word, but later romance language translations had the advantage of nouns such as le mot in French. Martin Luther rejected Zeitwort in favor of Wort, for instance, although later commentators repeatedly turned to a dynamic use involving the living word as felt by Jerome. For Heraclitus, logos provided the link between rational discourse and the rational structure. This logos holds always but humans always prove unable to understand it, but other people fail to notice what they do when awake, just as they forget what they do while asleep. For this reason it is necessary to follow what is common, but although the logos is common, most people live as if they had their own private understanding
7.
Topography
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Topography is the study of the shape and features of the surface of the Earth and other observable astronomical objects including planets, moons, and asteroids. The topography of an area could refer to the shapes and features themselves. This field of geoscience and planetary science is concerned with detail in general, including not only relief but also natural and artificial features. This meaning is common in the United States, where topographic maps with elevation contours have made topography synonymous with relief. The older sense of topography as the study of place still has currency in Europe, topography in a narrow sense involves the recording of relief or terrain, the three-dimensional quality of the surface, and the identification of specific landforms. This is also known as geomorphometry, in modern usage, this involves generation of elevation data in digital form. It is often considered to include the representation of the landform on a map by a variety of techniques, including contour lines, hypsometric tints. The term topography originated in ancient Greece and continued in ancient Rome, the word comes from the Greek τόπος and -γραφία. In classical literature this refers to writing about a place or places, in Britain and in Europe in general, the word topography is still sometimes used in its original sense. Detailed military surveys in Britain were called Ordnance Surveys, and this term was used into the 20th century as generic for topographic surveys, the earliest scientific surveys in France were called the Cassini maps after the family who produced them over four generations. The term topographic surveys appears to be American in origin, the earliest detailed surveys in the United States were made by the “Topographical Bureau of the Army, ” formed during the War of 1812, which became the Corps of Topographical Engineers in 1838. In the 20th century, the term started to be used to describe surface description in other fields where mapping in a broader sense is used. An objective of topography is to determine the position of any feature or more generally any point in terms of both a horizontal coordinate system such as latitude, longitude, and altitude, identifying features, and recognizing typical landform patterns are also part of the field. There are a variety of approaches to studying topography, which method to use depend on the scale and size of the area under study, its accessibility, and the quality of existing surveys. Work on one of the first topographic maps was begun in France by Giovanni Domenico Cassini, in areas where there has been an extensive direct survey and mapping program, the compiled data forms the basis of basic digital elevation datasets such as USGS DEM data. This data must often be cleaned to eliminate discrepancies between surveys, but it forms a valuable set of information for large-scale analysis. The original American topographic surveys involved not only recording of relief, remote sensing is a general term for geodata collection at a distance from the subject area. Besides their role in photogrammetry, aerial and satellite imagery can be used to identify and delineate terrain features, certainly they have become more and more a part of geovisualization, whether maps or GIS systems
8.
Bathymetry
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Bathymetry is the study of underwater depth of lake or ocean floors. In other words, bathymetry is the equivalent to hypsometry or topography. The name comes from Greek βαθύς, deep, and μέτρον, Bathymetric maps may also use a Digital Terrain Model and artificial illumination techniques to illustrate the depths being portrayed. The global bathymetry is combined with topography data to yield a Global Relief Model. Paleobathymetry is the study of past underwater depths, originally, bathymetry involved the measurement of ocean depth through depth sounding. Early techniques used pre-measured heavy rope or cable lowered over a ships side and this technique measures the depth only a singular point at a time, and is therefore inefficient. It is also subject to movements of the ship and currents moving the line out of true and therefore is inaccurate. The amount of time it takes for the sound or light to travel through the water, bounce off the seafloor, lIDAR/LADAR surveys are usually conducted by airborne systems. Starting in the early 1930s, single-beam sounders were used to make bathymetry maps, today, multibeam echosounders are typically used, which use hundreds of very narrow adjacent beams arranged in a fan-like swath of typically 90 to 170 degrees across. The tightly packed array of narrow individual beams provides very high angular resolution, in general a wide swath, which is depth dependent, allows a boat to map more seafloor in less time than a single-beam echosounder by making fewer passes. The beams update many times per second, allowing faster boat speed while maintaining 100% coverage of the seafloor, attitude sensors allow for the correction of the boats roll and pitch on the ocean surface, and a gyrocompass provides accurate heading information to correct for vessel yaw. A boat-mounted Global Positioning System positions the soundings with respect to the surface of the earth, sound speed profiles of the water column correct for refraction or ray-bending of the sound waves owing to non-uniform water column characteristics such as temperature, conductivity, and pressure. A computer system processes all the data, correcting for all of the factors as well as for the angle of each individual beam. The resulting sounding measurements are processed either manually, semi-automatically or automatically to produce a map of the area. As of 2010 a number of different outputs are generated, including a sub-set of the measurements that satisfy some conditions or integrated Digital Terrain Models. Historically, selection of measurements was more common in hydrographic applications while DTM construction was used for engineering surveys, geology, flow modeling, 2003–2005, DTMs have become more accepted in hydrographic practice. Satellites are also used to measure bathymetry, satellite radar maps deep-sea topography by detecting the subtle variations in sea level caused by the gravitational pull of undersea mountains, ridges, and other masses. On average, sea level is higher over mountains and ridges than over abyssal plains, coastal bathymetry data is available from NOAAs National Geophysical Data Center, which is now merged into National Centers for Environmental Information
9.
Landscape
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A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms and how they integrate with natural or man-made features. The character of a landscape helps define the self-image of the people who inhabit it and it is the dynamic backdrop to people’s lives. Landscape can be as varied as farmland, a landscape park, the activity of modifying the visible features of an area of land is referred to as landscaping. There are several definitions of what constitutes a landscape, depending on context, the term landscape emerged around the turn of the sixteenth century to denote a painting whose primary subject matter was natural scenery. Land may be taken in its sense of something to people belong. The suffix ‑scape is equivalent to the more common English suffix ‑ship, the roots of ‑ship are etymologically akin to Old English sceppan or scyppan, meaning to shape. The suffix ‑schaft is related to the verb schaffen, so that ‑ship, the word landscape, first recorded in 1598, was borrowed from a Dutch painters term. An example of this usage can be found as early as 1662 in the Book of Common Prayer, Could we but climb where Moses stood. Setting, In works of narrative, it includes the moment in time and geographic location in which a story takes place. Picturesque, The word literally means in the manner of a picture, fit to be made into a picture, and used as early as 1703, gilpin’s Essay on Prints defined picturesque as a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture. A view, A sight or prospect of some landscape or extended scene, wilderness, An uncultivated, uninhabited, and inhospitable region. Cityscape, The urban equivalent of a landscape, in the visual arts a cityscape is an artistic representation, such as a painting, drawing, print or photograph, of the physical aspects of a city or urban area. Seascape, A photograph, painting, or other work of art depicts the sea. Geomorphology is the study of the origin and evolution of topographic and bathymetric features created by physical or chemical processes operating at or near Earths surface. Geomorphology is practiced within physical geography, geology, geodesy, engineering geology, archaeology and this broad base of interests contributes to many research styles and interests within the field. The surface of Earth is modified by a combination of processes that sculpt landscapes, and geologic processes that cause tectonic uplift and subsidence. Many of these factors are strongly mediated by climate, the Earth surface and its topography therefore are an intersection of climatic, hydrologic, and biologic action with geologic processes. Desert, Plain, Taiga, Tundra, Wetland, Mountain, Mountain range, Cliff, Coast, Littoral zone, Glacier, Polar regions of Earth, Shrubland, Forest, Rainforest, Woodland, Jungle, Moors
10.
Landform
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A landform is a natural feature of the solid surface of the Earth or other planetary body. Landforms together make up a given terrain, and their arrangement in the landscape is known as topography, landforms are categorized by characteristic physical attributes such as elevation, slope, orientation, stratification, rock exposure, and soil type. Oceans and continents exemplify the highest-order landforms, landform elements are parts of a high-order landforms that can be further identified and systematically given a cohesive definition such as hill-tops, shoulders, saddles, foreslopes and backslopes. Some generic landform elements including, pits, peaks, channels, ridges, passes, pools, Terrain is the third or vertical dimension of land surface. Topography is the study of terrain, although the word is used as a synonym for relief itself. When relief is described underwater, the term bathymetry is used, in cartography, many different techniques are used to describe relief, including contour lines and TIN. Elementary landforms are the smallest homogeneous divisions of the land surface and these are areas with relatively homogeneous morphometric properties, bounded by lines of discontinuity. A plateau or a hill can be observed at various scales ranging from few hundred meters to hundreds of kilometers, hence, the spatial distribution of landforms is often scale-dependent as is the case for soils and geological strata. A number of factors, ranging from plate tectonics to erosion and deposition, can generate, landforms do not include man-made features, such as canals, ports and many harbors, and geographic features, such as deserts, forests, and grasslands. Many of the terms are not restricted to refer to features of the planet Earth, examples are mountains, hills, polar caps, and valleys, which are found on all of the terrestrial planets. The scientific study of landforms is known as geomorphology, landforms may be extracted from a digital elevation model using some automated techniques where the data has been gathered by modern satellites and stereoscopic aerial surveillance cameras. Until recently, compiling the data found in data sets required time consuming. The most detailed DEMs available are measured directly using LIDAR techniques, geomorphology Land List of landforms Open-geomorphometry project Terrain Open-Geomorphometry Project
11.
Physical geography
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Physical geography is one of the two major sub-fields of geography. Geomorphology seeks to understand landform history and dynamics, and predict future changes through a combination of observation, physical experiment. Thus the field encompasses water in rivers, lakes, aquifers and to an extent glaciers, in which the field examines the process and dynamics involved in these bodies of water. Similar to most fields of physical geography it has sub-fields that examine the bodies of water or their interaction with other spheres e. g. limnology and ecohydrology. Glaciology is the study of glaciers and ice sheets, or more commonly the cryosphere or ice, glaciology groups the latter as continental glaciers and the former as alpine glaciers. Glaciology also has a vast array of sub-fields examining the factors and processes involved in ice sheets and glaciers e. g. snow hydrology, Biogeography is the science which deals with geographic patterns of species distribution and the processes that result in these patterns. The main stimulus for the field since its founding has been that of evolution, plate tectonics, climatology examines both the nature of micro and macro climates and the natural and anthropogenic influences on them. The field is also sub-divided largely into the climates of various regions, meteorology is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the atmosphere that focuses on weather processes and short term forecasting. Studies in the field stretch back millennia, though significant progress in meteorology did not occur until the eighteenth century, meteorological phenomena are observable weather events which illuminate and are explained by the science of meteorology. Pedology is the study of soils in their natural environment and it is one of two main branches of soil science, the other being edaphology. Pedology mainly deals with pedogenesis, soil morphology, soil classification, palaeogeography is a cross-disciplinary study that examines the preserved material in the stratigraphic record to determine the distribution of the continents through geologic time. Almost all the evidence for the positions of the continents comes from geology in the form of fossils or paleomagnetism, the use of this data has resulted in evidence for continental drift, plate tectonics, and supercontinents. This, in turn, has supported palaeogeographic theories such as the Wilson cycle, coastal geography is the study of the dynamic interface between the ocean and the land, incorporating both the physical geography and the human geography of the coast. It involves an understanding of coastal weathering processes, particularly wave action, sediment movement and weathering, coastal geography, although predominantly geomorphological in its research, is not just concerned with coastal landforms, but also the causes and influences of sea level change. Oceanography is the branch of geography that studies the Earths oceans. These diverse topics reflect multiple disciplines that oceanographers blend to further knowledge of the world ocean, Quaternary science is an inter-disciplinary field of study focusing on the Quaternary period, which encompasses the last 2.6 million years. The field was founded by the German geographer Carl Troll. Landscape ecology typically deals with problems in an applied and holistic context, geomatics is the field of gathering, storing, processing, and delivering geographic information, or spatially referenced information
12.
Geology
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Geology is an earth science concerned with the solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which they change over time. Geology can also refer generally to the study of the features of any terrestrial planet. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth by providing the evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life. Geology also plays a role in engineering and is a major academic discipline. The majority of data comes from research on solid Earth materials. These typically fall into one of two categories, rock and unconsolidated material, the majority of research in geology is associated with the study of rock, as rock provides the primary record of the majority of the geologic history of the Earth. There are three types of rock, igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. The rock cycle is an important concept in geology which illustrates the relationships between three types of rock, and magma. When a rock crystallizes from melt, it is an igneous rock, the sedimentary rock can then be subsequently turned into a metamorphic rock due to heat and pressure and is then weathered, eroded, deposited, and lithified, ultimately becoming a sedimentary rock. Sedimentary rock may also be re-eroded and redeposited, and metamorphic rock may also undergo additional metamorphism, all three types of rocks may be re-melted, when this happens, a new magma is formed, from which an igneous rock may once again crystallize. Geologists also study unlithified material which typically comes from more recent deposits and these materials are superficial deposits which lie above the bedrock. Because of this, the study of material is often known as Quaternary geology. This includes the study of sediment and soils, including studies in geomorphology, sedimentology and this theory is supported by several types of observations, including seafloor spreading, and the global distribution of mountain terrain and seismicity. This coupling between rigid plates moving on the surface of the Earth and the mantle is called plate tectonics. The development of plate tectonics provided a basis for many observations of the solid Earth. Long linear regions of geologic features could be explained as plate boundaries, mid-ocean ridges, high regions on the seafloor where hydrothermal vents and volcanoes exist, were explained as divergent boundaries, where two plates move apart. Arcs of volcanoes and earthquakes were explained as convergent boundaries, where one plate subducts under another, transform boundaries, such as the San Andreas Fault system, resulted in widespread powerful earthquakes. Plate tectonics also provided a mechanism for Alfred Wegeners theory of continental drift and they also provided a driving force for crustal deformation, and a new setting for the observations of structural geology
13.
Geodesy
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Geodesists also study geodynamical phenomena such as crustal motion, tides, and polar motion. For this they design global and national networks, using space and terrestrial techniques while relying on datums. Geodesy — from the Ancient Greek word γεωδαισία geodaisia — is primarily concerned with positioning within the temporally varying gravity field, such geodetic operations are also applied to other astronomical bodies in the solar system. It is also the science of measuring and understanding the earths geometric shape, orientation in space and this applies to the solid surface, the liquid surface and the Earths atmosphere. For this reason, the study of the Earths gravity field is called physical geodesy by some, the geoid is essentially the figure of the Earth abstracted from its topographical features. It is an idealized surface of sea water, the mean sea level surface in the absence of currents, air pressure variations etc. The geoid, unlike the ellipsoid, is irregular and too complicated to serve as the computational surface on which to solve geometrical problems like point positioning. The geometrical separation between the geoid and the ellipsoid is called the geoidal undulation. It varies globally between ±110 m, when referred to the GRS80 ellipsoid, a reference ellipsoid, customarily chosen to be the same size as the geoid, is described by its semi-major axis a and flattening f. The quantity f = a − b/a, where b is the axis, is a purely geometrical one. The mechanical ellipticity of the Earth can be determined to high precision by observation of satellite orbit perturbations and its relationship with the geometrical flattening is indirect. The relationship depends on the density distribution, or, in simplest terms. The 1980 Geodetic Reference System posited a 6,378,137 m semi-major axis and this system was adopted at the XVII General Assembly of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics. It is essentially the basis for geodetic positioning by the Global Positioning System and is also in widespread use outside the geodetic community. The locations of points in space are most conveniently described by three cartesian or rectangular coordinates, X, Y and Z. Since the advent of satellite positioning, such systems are typically geocentric. The X-axis lies within the Greenwich observatorys meridian plane, the coordinate transformation between these two systems is described to good approximation by sidereal time, which takes into account variations in the Earths axial rotation. A more accurate description also takes polar motion into account, a closely monitored by geodesists
14.
Engineering geology
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Engineering geologists provide geological and geotechnical recommendations, analysis, and design associated with human development and various types of structures. The principal objective of the engineering geologist is the protection of life, the practice of engineering geology is also very closely related to the practice of geological engineering and geotechnical engineering. If there is a difference in the content of the disciplines, the first book titled Engineering Geology was published in 1880 by William Penning. The first American engineering geology textbook was written in 1914 by Ries, in 1925, Karl Terzaghi, an Austrian trained engineer and geologist, published the first text in Soil Mechanics. Terzaghi is known as the parent of soil mechanics, but also had great interest in geology, in 1929, Terzaghi, along with Redlich and Kampe, published their own Engineering Geology text. The need for geologist on engineering works gained worldwide attention in 1928 with the failure of the St. Francis Dam in California and these two aspects of the engineering geologists education provides them with a unique ability to understand and mitigate for hazards associated with earth-structure interactions. Soil mechanics is a discipline that applies principles of engineering mechanics, e. g. kinematics, dynamics, fluid mechanics, the fundamental processes are all related to the behaviour of porous media. Together, soil and rock mechanics are the basis for solving many engineering geology problems, an engineering geology report describes the objectives, methodology, references cited, tests performed, findings and recommendations for development and detailed design of engineering works. Engineering geologists also provide data on topographic maps, aerial photographs, geologic maps, Geographic Information System maps. Brock,1923, The Education of a Geologist, Economic Geology, v.18, bates and Jackson,1980, Glossary of Geology, American Geological Institute. Theory of Linear Poroelasticity with Applications to Geomechanics and Hydrogeology, Princeton Press, foundations of Engineering Geology, 2nd Edition, Taylor & Francis
15.
Archaeology
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Archaeology, or archeology, is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, Archaeology can be considered both a social science and a branch of the humanities. In North America, archaeology is considered a sub-field of anthropology, archaeologists study human prehistory and history, from the development of the first stone tools at Lomekwi in East Africa 3.3 million years ago up until recent decades. Archaeology as a field is distinct from the discipline of palaeontology, Archaeology is particularly important for learning about prehistoric societies, for whom there may be no written records to study. Prehistory includes over 99% of the human past, from the Paleolithic until the advent of literacy in societies across the world, Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time. The discipline involves surveying, excavation and eventually analysis of data collected to learn more about the past, in broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Archaeology developed out of antiquarianism in Europe during the 19th century, Archaeology has been used by nation-states to create particular visions of the past. Nonetheless, today, archaeologists face many problems, such as dealing with pseudoarchaeology, the looting of artifacts, a lack of public interest, the science of archaeology grew out of the older multi-disciplinary study known as antiquarianism. Antiquarians studied history with attention to ancient artifacts and manuscripts. Tentative steps towards the systematization of archaeology as a science took place during the Enlightenment era in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, in Europe, philosophical interest in the remains of Greco-Roman civilization and the rediscovery of classical culture began in the late Middle Age. Antiquarians, including John Leland and William Camden, conducted surveys of the English countryside, one of the first sites to undergo archaeological excavation was Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments in England. John Aubrey was a pioneer archaeologist who recorded numerous megalithic and other monuments in southern England. He was also ahead of his time in the analysis of his findings and he attempted to chart the chronological stylistic evolution of handwriting, medieval architecture, costume, and shield-shapes. Excavations were also carried out in the ancient towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum and these excavations began in 1748 in Pompeii, while in Herculaneum they began in 1738. The discovery of entire towns, complete with utensils and even human shapes, however, prior to the development of modern techniques, excavations tended to be haphazard, the importance of concepts such as stratification and context were overlooked. The father of archaeological excavation was William Cunnington and he undertook excavations in Wiltshire from around 1798, funded by Sir Richard Colt Hoare. Cunnington made meticulous recordings of neolithic and Bronze Age barrows, one of the major achievements of 19th century archaeology was the development of stratigraphy. The idea of overlapping strata tracing back to successive periods was borrowed from the new geological and paleontological work of scholars like William Smith, James Hutton, the application of stratigraphy to archaeology first took place with the excavations of prehistorical and Bronze Age sites
16.
Geotechnical engineering
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Geotechnical engineering is the branch of civil engineering concerned with the engineering behavior of earth materials. A typical geotechnical engineering project begins with a review of project needs to define the material properties. Site investigations are needed to gain an understanding of the area in or on which the engineering will take place, a geotechnical engineer then determines and designs the type of foundations, earthworks, and/or pavement subgrades required for the intended man-made structures to be built. Foundations built for above-ground structures include shallow and deep foundations, retaining structures include earth-filled dams and retaining walls. Earthworks include embankments, tunnels, dikes and levees, channels, reservoirs, deposition of hazardous waste, Geotechnical engineering is also related to coastal and ocean engineering. Coastal engineering can involve the design and construction of wharves, marinas, ocean engineering can involve foundation and anchor systems for offshore structures such as oil platforms. The fields of engineering and engineering geology are closely related. However, the field of engineering is a specialty of engineering. Humans have historically used soil as a material for flood control, irrigation purposes, burial sites, building foundations, as the cities expanded, structures were erected supported by formalized foundations, Ancient Greeks notably constructed pad footings and strip-and-raft foundations. Until the 18th century, however, no basis for soil design had been developed. Several foundation-related engineering problems, such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the earliest advances occurred in the development of earth pressure theories for the construction of retaining walls. Henri Gautier, a French Royal Engineer, recognized the natural slope of different soils in 1717, a rudimentary soil classification system was also developed based on a materials unit weight, which is no longer considered a good indication of soil type. The application of the principles of mechanics to soils was documented as early as 1773 when Charles Coulomb developed improved methods to determine the pressures against military ramparts. By combining Coulombs theory with Christian Otto Mohrs 2D stress state, although it is now recognized that precise determination of cohesion is impossible because c is not a fundamental soil property, the Mohr-Coulomb theory is still used in practice today. In the 19th century Henry Darcy developed what is now known as Darcys Law describing the flow of fluids in porous media, albert Atterberg developed the clay consistency indices that are still used today for soil classification. Osborne Reynolds recognized in 1885 that shearing causes volumetric dilation of dense, modern geotechnical engineering is said to have begun in 1925 with the publication of Erdbaumechanik by Karl Terzaghi. Terzaghi also developed the framework for theories of bearing capacity of foundations, in his 1948 book, Donald Taylor recognized that interlocking and dilation of densely packed particles contributed to the peak strength of a soil. Critical state soil mechanics is the basis for many contemporary advanced constitutive models describing the behavior of soil, Geotechnical centrifuge modeling is a method of testing physical scale models of geotechnical problems
17.
Weathering
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Weathering is the breaking down of rocks, soil, and minerals as well as wood and artificial materials through contact with the Earths atmosphere, waters, and biological organisms. Two important classifications of weathering processes exist – physical and chemical weathering, mechanical or physical weathering involves the breakdown of rocks and soils through direct contact with atmospheric conditions, such as heat, water, ice and pressure. While physical weathering is accentuated in very cold or very dry environments, chemical reactions are most intense where the climate is wet, however, both types of weathering occur together, and each tends to accelerate the other. For example, physical abrasion decreases the size of particles and therefore increases their surface area, the various agents act in concert to convert primary minerals to secondary minerals and release plant nutrient elements in soluble forms. The materials left over after the rock breaks down combined with organic material creates soil, in addition, many of Earths landforms and landscapes are the result of weathering processes combined with erosion and re-deposition. Physical weathering, also recognized as mechanical weathering, is the class of processes that causes the disintegration of rocks without chemical change, the primary process in physical weathering is abrasion. However, chemical and physical weathering often go hand in hand, physical weathering can occur due to temperature, pressure, frost etc. For example, cracks exploited by physical weathering will increase the area exposed to chemical action. Abrasion by water, ice, and wind loaded with sediment can have tremendous cutting power, as is amply demonstrated by the gorges, ravines. In glacial areas, huge moving ice masses embedded with soil and rock fragments grind down rocks in their path, plant roots sometimes enter cracks in rocks and pry them apart, resulting in some disintegration, Burrowing animals may help disintegrate rock through their physical action. However, such influences are usually of importance in producing parent material when compared to the drastic physical effects of water, ice, wind. Physical weathering is called mechanical weathering or disaggregation. Thermal stress weathering results from the expansion and contraction of rock, for example, heating of rocks by sunlight or fires can cause expansion of their constituent minerals. As some minerals expand more than others, temperature changes set up differential stresses that cause the rock to crack apart. Because the outer surface of a rock is often warmer or colder than the more protected inner portions and this process may be sharply accelerated if ice forms in the surface cracks. When water freezes, it expands with a force of about 1465 Mg/m^2, disintegrating huge rock masses, thermal stress weathering comprises two main types, thermal shock and thermal fatigue. Thermal stress weathering is an important mechanism in deserts, where there is a diurnal temperature range, hot in the day. The repeated heating and cooling exerts stress on the layers of rocks
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Earth
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Earth, otherwise known as the World, or the Globe, is the third planet from the Sun and the only object in the Universe known to harbor life. It is the densest planet in the Solar System and the largest of the four terrestrial planets, according to radiometric dating and other sources of evidence, Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago. Earths gravity interacts with objects in space, especially the Sun. During one orbit around the Sun, Earth rotates about its axis over 365 times, thus, Earths axis of rotation is tilted, producing seasonal variations on the planets surface. The gravitational interaction between the Earth and Moon causes ocean tides, stabilizes the Earths orientation on its axis, Earths lithosphere is divided into several rigid tectonic plates that migrate across the surface over periods of many millions of years. About 71% of Earths surface is covered with water, mostly by its oceans, the remaining 29% is land consisting of continents and islands that together have many lakes, rivers and other sources of water that contribute to the hydrosphere. The majority of Earths polar regions are covered in ice, including the Antarctic ice sheet, Earths interior remains active with a solid iron inner core, a liquid outer core that generates the Earths magnetic field, and a convecting mantle that drives plate tectonics. Within the first billion years of Earths history, life appeared in the oceans and began to affect the Earths atmosphere and surface, some geological evidence indicates that life may have arisen as much as 4.1 billion years ago. Since then, the combination of Earths distance from the Sun, physical properties, in the history of the Earth, biodiversity has gone through long periods of expansion, occasionally punctuated by mass extinction events. Over 99% of all species that lived on Earth are extinct. Estimates of the number of species on Earth today vary widely, over 7.4 billion humans live on Earth and depend on its biosphere and minerals for their survival. Humans have developed diverse societies and cultures, politically, the world has about 200 sovereign states, the modern English word Earth developed from a wide variety of Middle English forms, which derived from an Old English noun most often spelled eorðe. It has cognates in every Germanic language, and their proto-Germanic root has been reconstructed as *erþō, originally, earth was written in lowercase, and from early Middle English, its definite sense as the globe was expressed as the earth. By early Modern English, many nouns were capitalized, and the became the Earth. More recently, the name is simply given as Earth. House styles now vary, Oxford spelling recognizes the lowercase form as the most common, another convention capitalizes Earth when appearing as a name but writes it in lowercase when preceded by the. It almost always appears in lowercase in colloquial expressions such as what on earth are you doing, the oldest material found in the Solar System is dated to 4. 5672±0.0006 billion years ago. By 4. 54±0.04 Gya the primordial Earth had formed, the formation and evolution of Solar System bodies occurred along with the Sun
19.
Tectonic uplift
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Tectonic uplift is the portion of the total geologic uplift of the mean Earth surface that is not attributable to an isostatic response to unloading. One should also take into consideration the effects of denudation, within the scope of this topic, uplift relates to denudation in that denudation brings buried rocks closer to the surface. This process can redistribute large loads from a region to a topographically lower area as well – thus promoting isostatic response in the region of denudation. The timing, magnitude, and rate of denudation can be estimated using pressure-temperature studies, crustal thickening has an upward component of motion and often occurs when continental crust is thrust onto continental crust. The process of nappe stacking can only continue for so long, although the raised surfaces of mountain ranges mainly result from crustal thickening, there are other forces at play that are responsible for tectonic activity. All tectonic processes are driven by force when density differences are present. A good example of this would be the large-scale circulation of the Earths mantle, lateral density variations near the surface also drive plate motion. The dynamics of mountain ranges are governed by differences in the potential energy of entire columns of lithosphere. The highest rates of working against gravity are required when the thickness of the crust changes, lithosphere on the oceanward side of an oceanic trench at a subduction zone will curve upwards due to the elastic properties of the Earths crust. Orogenic uplift is the result of collisions and results in mountain ranges or a more modest uplift over a large region. Perhaps the most extreme form of uplift is a continental-continental crustal collision. In this process, two continents are sutured together and large mountain ranges are produced, the collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates is a good example of the extent to which orogenic uplift can reach. Heavy thrust faulting and folding are responsible for the suturing together of the two plates, the collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates not only produced the Himalaya, but is also responsible for crustal thickening north into Siberia. The Pamir Mountains, Tian Shan, Altai, Hindu Kush, deformation of continental lithosphere can take place in several possible modes. The Ozark Plateau is an uplifted area which resulted from the Permian Ouachita Orogeny to the south in the states of Arkansas, Oklahoma. Another related uplift is the Llano Uplift in Texas, a location named after its uplift features. The Colorado Plateau which includes the Grand Canyon is also the result of tectonic uplift followed by river erosion. The removal of mass from a region will be compensated by crustal rebound
20.
Subsidence
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Subsidence is the motion of a surface as it shifts downward relative to a datum such as sea level. The opposite of subsidence is uplift, which results in an increase in elevation, ground subsidence is of concern to geologists, geotechnical engineers and surveyors. Subsidence frequently causes problems in karst terrains, where dissolution of limestone by fluid flow in the subsurface causes the creation of voids. If the roof of these voids becomes too weak, it can collapse and this type of subsidence can result in sinkholes which can be many hundreds of meters deep. Several types of mining, and specifically methods which intentionally cause the extracted void to collapse will result in surface subsidence. Mining-induced subsidence is relatively predictable in its magnitude, manifestation and extent, mining-induced subsidence is nearly always very localized to the surface above the mined area, plus a margin around the outside. Where mining activity is planned, mining-induced subsidence can be successfully managed if there is co-operation from all of the stakeholders and this is accomplished through a combination of careful mine planning, the taking of preventive measures, and the carrying out of repairs post-mining. If natural gas is extracted from a gas field the initial pressure in the field will drop over the years. The gas pressure also supports the soil layers above the field, if the pressure drops, the soil pressure increases and this leads to subsidence at the ground level. Since exploitation of the Slochteren gas field started in the late 1960s the ground level over a 250 km² area has dropped by a current maximum of 30 cm, the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan reported immediate subsidence caused by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake. In Northern Japan, subsidence of 0.50 m was observed on the coast of the Pacific Ocean in Miyako, Tōhoku, while Rikuzentakata, in the south at Sōma, Fukushima,0.29 m was observed. The maximum amount of subsidence was 1.2 m, coupled with horizontal diastrophism of up to 5.3 m on the Oshika Peninsula in Miyagi Prefecture, the habitation of lowlands, such as coastal or delta plains, requires drainage. The resulting aeration of the leads to the oxidation of its organic components, such as peat. This applies especially when water levels are periodically adapted to subsidence, in order to maintain desired unsaturated zone depths. In addition to this, drained soils consolidate as a result of increased effective stress, in this way, land subsidence has the potential of becoming self-perpetuating, having rates up to 5 cm/yr. Water management used to be tuned primarily to such as crop optimisation but, to varying extents. When differential stresses exist in the Earth, these can be accommodated either by geological faulting in the brittle crust, or by flow in the hotter. Where faults occur, absolute subsidence may occur in the wall of normal faults
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Coastal geography
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Coastal geography is the study of the dynamic interface between the ocean and the land, incorporating both the physical geography and the human geography of the coast. It involves an understanding of coastal weathering processes, particularly wave action, sediment movement and weather, the waves of different strengths that constantly hit against the shoreline are the primary movers and shapers of the coastline. Despite the simplicity of process, the differences between waves and the rocks they hit result in hugely varying shapes. The effect that waves have depends on their strength, strong waves, also called destructive waves, occur on high-energy beaches and are typical of winter. They reduce the quantity of sediment present on the beach by carrying it out to bars under the sea, constructive, weak waves are typical of low-energy beaches and occur most during summer. They do the opposite to destructive waves and increase the size of the beach by piling sediment up onto the berm, one of the most important transport mechanisms results from wave refraction. Since waves rarely break onto a shore at right angles, the movement of water onto the beach occurs at an oblique angle. However, the return of water is at right angles to the beach and this movement is known as beach drift. The endless cycle of swash and backwash and resulting beach drift can be observed on all beaches, probably the most important effect is longshore drift, the process by which sediment is continuously moved along beaches by wave action. LSD occurs because waves hit the shore at an angle, pick up sediment on the shore, due to gravity, the water then falls back perpendicular to the beach, dropping its sediment as it loses energy. The sediment is then picked up by the wave and pushed slightly further down the beach. This is the reason why long strips of coast are covered in sediment, not just the areas around river mouths, LSD helps create many landforms including barrier islands, bay beaches and spits. Onshore winds blowing up the beach, pick up sand and move it up the beach to form sand dunes, rain hits the shore and erodes rocks, and carries weathered material to the shoreline to form beaches. Warm weather can encourage biological processes to more rapidly. In tropical areas some plants and animals protect stones from weathering, while other plants, temperatures that vary from below to above freezing point result in frost weathering, whereas weather more than a few degrees below freezing point creates sea ice. In tropical regions in particular, plants and animals not only affect the weathering of rocks but are a source of sediment themselves, the shells and skeletons of many organisms are of calcium carbonate and when this is broken down it forms sediment, limestone and clay. The main physical Weathering process on beaches is salt-crystal growth, wind carries salt spray onto rocks, where it is absorbed into small pores and cracks within the rocks. There the water evaporates and the salt crystallises, creating pressure, in some beaches calcium carbonate is able to bind together other sediments to form beachrock and in warmer areas dunerock
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Water
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Water is a transparent and nearly colorless chemical substance that is the main constituent of Earths streams, lakes, and oceans, and the fluids of most living organisms. Its chemical formula is H2O, meaning that its molecule contains one oxygen, Water strictly refers to the liquid state of that substance, that prevails at standard ambient temperature and pressure, but it often refers also to its solid state or its gaseous state. It also occurs in nature as snow, glaciers, ice packs and icebergs, clouds, fog, dew, aquifers, Water covers 71% of the Earths surface. It is vital for all forms of life. Only 2. 5% of this water is freshwater, and 98. 8% of that water is in ice and groundwater. Less than 0. 3% of all freshwater is in rivers, lakes, and the atmosphere, a greater quantity of water is found in the earths interior. Water on Earth moves continually through the cycle of evaporation and transpiration, condensation, precipitation. Evaporation and transpiration contribute to the precipitation over land, large amounts of water are also chemically combined or adsorbed in hydrated minerals. Safe drinking water is essential to humans and other even though it provides no calories or organic nutrients. There is a correlation between access to safe water and gross domestic product per capita. However, some observers have estimated that by 2025 more than half of the population will be facing water-based vulnerability. A report, issued in November 2009, suggests that by 2030, in developing regions of the world. Water plays an important role in the world economy, approximately 70% of the freshwater used by humans goes to agriculture. Fishing in salt and fresh water bodies is a source of food for many parts of the world. Much of long-distance trade of commodities and manufactured products is transported by boats through seas, rivers, lakes, large quantities of water, ice, and steam are used for cooling and heating, in industry and homes. Water is an excellent solvent for a variety of chemical substances, as such it is widely used in industrial processes. Water is also central to many sports and other forms of entertainment, such as swimming, pleasure boating, boat racing, surfing, sport fishing, Water is a liquid at the temperatures and pressures that are most adequate for life. Specifically, at atmospheric pressure of 1 bar, water is a liquid between the temperatures of 273.15 K and 373.15 K
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Wind
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Wind is the flow of gases on a large scale. On the surface of the Earth, wind consists of the movement of air. Winds are commonly classified by their scale, their speed, the types of forces that cause them, the regions in which they occur. The strongest observed winds on a planet in the Solar System occur on Neptune, Winds have various aspects, an important one being its velocity, another the density of the gas involved, another its energy content or wind energy. In meteorology, winds are referred to according to their strength. Short bursts of high speed wind are termed gusts, strong winds of intermediate duration are termed squalls. Long-duration winds have various names associated with their strength, such as breeze, gale, storm. The two main causes of large-scale atmospheric circulation are the differential heating between the equator and the poles, and the rotation of the planet, within the tropics, thermal low circulations over terrain and high plateaus can drive monsoon circulations. In coastal areas the sea breeze/land breeze cycle can define local winds, in areas that have variable terrain, mountain, Wind powers the voyages of sailing ships across Earths oceans. Hot air balloons use the wind to take trips, and powered flight uses it to increase lift. Areas of wind caused by various weather phenomena can lead to dangerous situations for aircraft. When winds become strong, trees and man-made structures are damaged or destroyed, Winds can shape landforms, via a variety of aeolian processes such as the formation of fertile soils, such as loess, and by erosion. Wind also affects the spread of wildfires, Winds can disperse seeds from various plants, enabling the survival and dispersal of those plant species, as well as flying insect populations. When combined with temperatures, wind has a negative impact on livestock. Wind affects animals food stores, as well as their hunting, Wind is caused by differences in the atmospheric pressure. When a difference in atmospheric pressure exists, air moves from the higher to the pressure area. On a rotating planet, air will also be deflected by the Coriolis effect, globally, the two major driving factors of large-scale wind patterns are the differential heating between the equator and the poles and the rotation of the planet. Outside the tropics and aloft from frictional effects of the surface, near the Earths surface, friction causes the wind to be slower than it would be otherwise
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Ice
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Ice is water frozen into a solid state. Depending on the presence of such as particles of soil or bubbles of air. In the Solar System, ice is abundant and occurs naturally from as close to the Sun as Mercury to as far as away the Oort cloud objects, beyond the Solar System, it occurs as interstellar ice. It falls as snowflakes and hail or occurs as frost, icicles or ice spikes, Ice molecules can exhibit up to sixteen different phases that depend on temperature and pressure. When water is cooled rapidly, up to three different types of ice can form depending on the history of its pressure and temperature. When cooled slowly correlated proton tunneling occurs below 20 K giving rise to macroscopic quantum phenomena, virtually all the ice on Earths surface and in its atmosphere is of a hexagonal crystalline structure denoted as ice Ih with minute traces of cubic ice denoted as ice Ic. The most common phase transition to ice Ih occurs when water is cooled below 0°C at standard atmospheric pressure. It may also be deposited directly by water vapor, as happens in the formation of frost, the transition from ice to water is melting and from ice directly to water vapor is sublimation. Ice is used in a variety of ways, including cooling, winter sports, as a naturally occurring crystalline inorganic solid with an ordered structure, ice is considered a mineral. It possesses a regular crystalline structure based on the molecule of water, an unusual property of ice frozen at atmospheric pressure is that the solid is approximately 8. 3% less dense than liquid water. The density of ice is 0.9167 g/cm3 at 0 °C, liquid water is densest, essentially 1.00 g/cm³, at 4 °C and becomes less dense as the water molecules begin to form the hexagonal crystals of ice as the freezing point is reached. This is due to hydrogen bonding dominating the intermolecular forces, which results in a packing of molecules less compact in the solid, density of ice increases slightly with decreasing temperature and has a value of 0.9340 g/cm³ at −180 °C. When water freezes, it increases in volume and it is also a common cause of the flooding of houses when water pipes burst due to the pressure of expanding water when it freezes. The result of this process is that ice floats on liquid water, sufficiently thin ice sheets allow light to pass through while protecting the underside from short-term weather extremes such as wind chill. This creates an environment for bacterial and algal colonies. When ice melts, it absorbs as much energy as it would take to heat an equivalent mass of water by 80 °C, during the melting process, the temperature remains constant at 0 °C. While melting, any energy added breaks the bonds between ice molecules. Energy becomes available to increase the thermal energy only after enough hydrogen bonds are broken that the ice can be considered liquid water, the amount of energy consumed in breaking hydrogen bonds in the transition from ice to water is known as the heat of fusion
25.
Wildfire
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A wildfire or wildland fire is a fire in an area of combustible vegetation that occurs in the countryside or rural area. Fossil charcoal indicates that wildfires began soon after the appearance of terrestrial plants 420 million years ago, wildfire’s occurrence throughout the history of terrestrial life invites conjecture that fire must have had pronounced evolutionary effects on most ecosystems flora and fauna. Earth is an intrinsically flammable planet owing to its cover of vegetation, seasonally dry climates, atmospheric oxygen, widespread lightning. Wildfires can be characterised in terms of the cause of ignition, their properties, the combustible material present. Wildfires can cause damage to property and human life, but they have beneficial effects on native vegetation, animals. Many plant species depend on the effects of fire for growth, however, wildfire in ecosystems where wildfire is uncommon or where non-native vegetation has encroached may have negative ecological effects. Wildfire behaviour and severity result from the combination of such as available fuels, physical setting. Strategies of wildfire prevention, detection and suppression have varied over the years, one common and inexpensive technique is controlled burning, permitting or even igniting smaller fires to minimise the amount of flammable material available for a potential wildfire. Vegetation may be burned periodically to maintain species diversity and frequent burning of surface fuels limits fuel accumulation. Wildland fire use is the cheapest and most ecologically appropriate policy for many forests, fuels may also be removed by logging, but fuels treatments and thinning have no effect on severe fire behaviour. Wildfires can also be started in communities experiencing shifting cultivation, where land is cleared quickly and farmed until the soil loses fertility, forested areas cleared by logging encourage the dominance of flammable grasses, and abandoned logging roads overgrown by vegetation may act as fire corridors. The most common cause of wildfires throughout the world. In Canada and northwest China, for example, lightning operates as the source of ignition. In other parts of the world, human involvement is a major contributor, in China and in the Mediterranean Basin, human carelessness is a major cause of wildfires. In the United States and Australia, the source of wildfires can be traced both to lightning strikes and to human activities. Coal seam fires burn in the thousands around the world, such as those in Burning Mountain, New South Wales, Centralia, Pennsylvania and they can also flare up unexpectedly and ignite nearby flammable material. The spread of wildfires based on the flammable material present, its vertical arrangement and moisture content. Fuel arrangement and density is governed in part by topography, as land shape determines factors such as available sunlight, overall, fire types can be generally characterized by their fuels as follows, Ground fires are fed by subterranean roots, duff and other buried organic matter
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Soil
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Soil is a mixture of minerals, organic matter, gases, liquids, and countless organisms that together support life on Earth. Soil is called the Skin of the Earth and interfaces with the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, the term pedolith, used commonly to refer to the soil, literally translates ground stone. Soil consists of a phase of minerals and organic matter, as well as a porous phase that holds gases. Accordingly, soils are often treated as a system of solids, liquids. Soil is a product of the influence of climate, relief, organisms, Soil continually undergoes development by way of numerous physical, chemical and biological processes, which include weathering with associated erosion. Given its complexity and strong internal connectedness soil has been considered as an ecosystem by soil ecologists. Most soils have a dry bulk density between 1.1 and 1.6 g/cm3, while the particle density is much higher. Little of the soil of planet Earth is older than the Pleistocene and none is older than the Cenozoic, Soil science has two basic branches of study, edaphology and pedology. Edaphology is concerned with the influence of soils on living things, pedology is focused on the formation, description, and classification of soils in their natural environment. In engineering terms, soil is referred to as regolith, or loose material that lies above the solid geology. Soil is commonly referred to as earth or dirt, technically, as soil resources serve as a basis for food security, the international community advocates its sustainable and responsible use through different types of soil governance. Soil is a component of the Earths ecosystem. The worlds ecosystems are impacted in far-reaching ways by the carried out in the soil, from ozone depletion and global warming, to rainforest destruction. Following the atmosphere, the soil is the next largest carbon reservoir on Earth, as the planet warms, soils will add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere due to its increased biological activity at higher temperatures. Thus, soil carbon losses likely have a positive feedback response to global warming. Since soil has a range of available niches and habitats. A gram of soil can contain billions of organisms, belonging to thousands of species, mostly microbial, Soil has a mean prokaryotic density of roughly 108 organisms per gram, whereas the ocean has no more than 107 procaryotic organisms per milliliter of seawater. Since plant roots need oxygen, ventilation is an important characteristic of soil and this ventilation can be accomplished via networks of interconnected soil pores, which also absorb and hold rainwater making it readily available for plant uptake
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Gravity
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Gravity, or gravitation, is a natural phenomenon by which all things with mass are brought toward one another, including planets, stars and galaxies. Since energy and mass are equivalent, all forms of energy, including light, on Earth, gravity gives weight to physical objects and causes the ocean tides. Gravity has a range, although its effects become increasingly weaker on farther objects. The most extreme example of this curvature of spacetime is a hole, from which nothing can escape once past its event horizon. More gravity results in time dilation, where time lapses more slowly at a lower gravitational potential. Gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental interactions of nature, the gravitational attraction is approximately 1038 times weaker than the strong force,1036 times weaker than the electromagnetic force and 1029 times weaker than the weak force. As a consequence, gravity has an influence on the behavior of subatomic particles. On the other hand, gravity is the dominant interaction at the macroscopic scale, for this reason, in part, pursuit of a theory of everything, the merging of the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics into quantum gravity, has become an area of research. While the modern European thinkers are credited with development of gravitational theory, some of the earliest descriptions came from early mathematician-astronomers, such as Aryabhata, who had identified the force of gravity to explain why objects do not fall out when the Earth rotates. Later, the works of Brahmagupta referred to the presence of force, described it as an attractive force. Modern work on gravitational theory began with the work of Galileo Galilei in the late 16th and this was a major departure from Aristotles belief that heavier objects have a higher gravitational acceleration. Galileo postulated air resistance as the reason that objects with less mass may fall slower in an atmosphere, galileos work set the stage for the formulation of Newtons theory of gravity. In 1687, English mathematician Sir Isaac Newton published Principia, which hypothesizes the inverse-square law of universal gravitation. Newtons theory enjoyed its greatest success when it was used to predict the existence of Neptune based on motions of Uranus that could not be accounted for by the actions of the other planets. Calculations by both John Couch Adams and Urbain Le Verrier predicted the position of the planet. A discrepancy in Mercurys orbit pointed out flaws in Newtons theory, the issue was resolved in 1915 by Albert Einsteins new theory of general relativity, which accounted for the small discrepancy in Mercurys orbit. The simplest way to test the equivalence principle is to drop two objects of different masses or compositions in a vacuum and see whether they hit the ground at the same time. Such experiments demonstrate that all objects fall at the rate when other forces are negligible
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Climate
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Climate is the statistics of weather, usually over a 30-year interval. Climate differs from weather, in that weather only describes the conditions of these variables in a given region. A regions climate is generated by the system, which has five components, atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere. The climate of a location is affected by its latitude, terrain, climates can be classified according to the average and the typical ranges of different variables, most commonly temperature and precipitation. The most commonly used classification scheme was the Köppen climate classification, the Bergeron and Spatial Synoptic Classification systems focus on the origin of air masses that define the climate of a region. Paleoclimatology is the study of ancient climates, Climate models are mathematical models of past, present and future climates. Climate change may occur long and short timescales from a variety of factors. For example, a 3°C change in mean annual temperature corresponds to a shift in isotherms of approximately 300–400 km in latitude or 500 m in elevation, therefore, species are expected to move upwards in elevation or towards the poles in latitude in response to shifting climate zones. Climate is commonly defined as the weather averaged over a long period, the standard averaging period is 30 years, but other periods may be used depending on the purpose. Climate also includes statistics other than the average, such as the magnitudes of day-to-day or year-to-year variations, the classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization. These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system. The World Meteorological Organization describes climate normals as reference points used by climatologists to compare current climatological trends to that of the past or what is considered normal, a Normal is defined as the arithmetic average of a climate element over a 30-year period. A30 year period is used, as it is enough to filter out any interannual variation or anomalies. The WMO originated from the International Meteorological Organization which set up a commission for climatology in 1929. At its 1934 Wiesbaden meeting the commission designated the thirty-year period from 1901 to 1930 as the reference time frame for climatological standard normals. In 1982 the WMO agreed to update climate normals, and in these were completed on the basis of climate data from 1 January 1961 to 31 December 1990. The difference between climate and weather is usefully summarized by the popular phrase Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get. Over historical time spans there are a number of nearly constant variables that determine climate, including latitude, altitude, proportion of land to water and these change only over periods of millions of years due to processes such as plate tectonics
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Mountain range
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A mountain range is a geographic area containing numerous geologically related mountains. A mountain system or system of ranges, sometimes is used to combine several geological features that are geographically related. Mountain ranges are usually segmented by highlands or mountain passes and valleys, individual mountains within the same mountain range do not necessarily have the same geologic structure or petrology. They may be a mix of different orogenic expressions and terranes, for example thrust sheets, uplifted blocks, fold mountains, most geologically young mountain ranges on the Earths land surface are associated with either the Pacific Ring of Fire or the Alpide Belt. The Andes is 7,000 kilometres long and is considered the worlds longest mountain system. The Alpide belt includes Indonesia and southeast Asia, through the Himalaya, the belt also includes other European and Asian mountain ranges. The Himalayas contain the highest mountains in the world, including Mount Everest, mountain ranges outside of these two systems include the Arctic Cordillera, the Urals, the Appalachians, the Scandinavian Mountains, the Altai Mountains and the Hijaz Mountains. If the definition of a range is stretched to include underwater mountains. The mountain systems of the earth are characterized by a tree structure, the sub-range relationship is often expressed as a parent-child relationship. For example, the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Blue Ridge Mountains are sub-ranges of the Appalachian Mountains, equivalently, the Appalachians are the parent of the White Mountains and Blue Ridge Mountains, and the White Mountains and the Blue Ridge Mountains are children of the Appalachians. The position of mountains influences climate, such as rain or snow, when air masses move up and over mountains, the air cools producing orographic precipitation. As the air descends on the side, it warms again and is drier. Often, a shadow will affect the leeward side of a range. Mountain ranges are constantly subjected to forces which work to tear them down. Erosion is at work while the mountains are being uplifted and long after until the mountains are reduced to low hills, rivers are traditionally believed to be the principle erosive factor on mountain ranges, with their ability of bedrock incision and sediment transport. The rugged topography of a range is the product of erosion. The basins adjacent to a mountain range are filled with sediments which are buried and turned into sedimentary rock. The early Cenozoic uplift of the Rocky Mountains of Colorado provides an example and this mass of rock was removed as the range was actively undergoing uplift
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Volcano
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A volcano is a rupture in the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface. Earths volcanoes occur because its crust is broken into 17 major, therefore, on Earth, volcanoes are generally found where tectonic plates are diverging or converging. This type of volcanism falls under the umbrella of plate hypothesis volcanism, Volcanism away from plate boundaries has also been explained as mantle plumes. These so-called hotspots, for example Hawaii, are postulated to arise from upwelling diapirs with magma from the boundary,3,000 km deep in the Earth. Volcanoes are usually not created where two plates slide past one another. Erupting volcanoes can pose hazards, not only in the immediate vicinity of the eruption. Historically, so-called volcanic winters have caused catastrophic famines, the word volcano is derived from the name of Vulcano, a volcanic island in the Aeolian Islands of Italy whose name in turn comes from Vulcan, the god of fire in Roman mythology. The study of volcanoes is called volcanology, sometimes spelled vulcanology, at the mid-oceanic ridges, two tectonic plates diverge from one another as new oceanic crust is formed by the cooling and solidifying of hot molten rock. Most divergent plate boundaries are at the bottom of the oceans, therefore, most volcanic activity is submarine, black smokers are evidence of this kind of volcanic activity. Where the mid-oceanic ridge is above sea-level, volcanic islands are formed, for example, subduction zones are places where two plates, usually an oceanic plate and a continental plate, collide. In this case, the plate subducts, or submerges under the continental plate forming a deep ocean trench just offshore. In a process called flux melting, water released from the subducting plate lowers the temperature of the overlying mantle wedge. This magma tends to be very viscous due to its high content, so it often does not reach the surface. When it does reach the surface, a volcano is formed, typical examples of this kind of volcano are Mount Etna and the volcanoes in the Pacific Ring of Fire. Because tectonic plates move across them, each volcano becomes dormant and is eventually re-formed as the plate advances over the postulated plume and this theory is currently under criticism, however. The most common perception of a volcano is of a mountain, spewing lava and poisonous gases from a crater at its summit, however. The features of volcanoes are more complicated and their structure. Some volcanoes have rugged peaks formed by lava domes rather than a summit crater while others have features such as massive plateaus
31.
Isostasy
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Isostasy is the state of gravitational equilibrium between Earths crust and mantle such that the crust floats at an elevation that depends on its thickness and density. This concept is invoked to explain how different topographic heights can exist at Earths surface, when a certain area of Earths crust reaches the state of isostasy, it is said to be in isostatic equilibrium. Isostasy does not upset equilibrium but instead restores it and it is generally accepted that Earth is a dynamic system that responds to loads in many different ways. However, isostasy provides an important view of the processes that are happening in areas that are experiencing vertical movement. In the simplest example, isostasy is the principle of buoyancy wherein an object immersed in a fluid is buoyed with a equal to the weight of the displaced fluid. The general term isostasy was coined in the year 1889 by the American geologist Clarence Dutton, the Vening Meinesz, or flexural isostasy model – where the lithosphere acts as an elastic plate and its inherent rigidity distributes local topographic loads over a broad region by bending. Airy and Pratt isostasy are statements of buoyancy, whereas flexural isostasy is a statement of buoyancy when deflecting a sheet of finite elastic strength. The basis of the model is Pascals law, and particularly its consequence that, within a fluid in static equilibrium, in other words, h1⋅ρ1 = h2⋅ρ2 = h3⋅ρ3 =. This hypothesis was suggested to explain how large topographic loads such as seamounts could be compensated by regional rather than local displacement of the lithosphere. When large amounts of sediment are deposited on a particular region, similarly, when large amounts of material are eroded away from a region, the land may rise to compensate. Therefore, as a range is eroded, the range rebounds upwards to be eroded further. An analogy may be made with an iceberg—it always floats with a proportion of its mass below the surface of the water. If more ice is added to the top of the iceberg, if a layer of ice is somehow sliced off the top of the iceberg, the remaining iceberg will rise. Similarly, Earths lithosphere floats in the asthenosphere, when continents collide, the continental crust may thicken at their edges in the collision. If this happens, much of the thickened crust may move downwards rather than up as with the iceberg analogy, the idea of continental collisions building mountains up is therefore rather a simplification. Instead, the crust thickens and the part of the thickened crust may become a mountain range. However, some continental collisions are far more complex than this, the formation of ice sheets can cause Earths surface to sink. Conversely, isostatic rebound is observed in areas once covered by ice sheets that have now melted, such as around the Baltic Sea
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Sedimentary basin
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Sedimentary basins are regions of Earth of long-term subsidence creating accommodation space for infilling by sediments. Sedimentary basins occur in diverse geological settings usually associated with tectonic activity. Basins formed in different plate tectonic regimes vary in their preservation potential, on oceanic crust, basins are likely to be subducted, while marginal continental basins may be partially preserved, and intracratonic basins have a high probability of preservation. As the sediments are buried, they are subjected to increasing pressure, a number of basins formed in extensional settings can undergo inversion which has accounted for a number of the economically viable oil reserves on earth which were formerly basins. Sedimentary basins form primarily in convergent, divergent and transform settings, convergent boundaries create foreland basins through tectonic compression of oceanic and continental crust during lithospheric flexure. Tectonic extension at divergent boundaries where continental rifting is occurring can create a nascent ocean basin leading to either an ocean or the failure of the rift zone. If the lithosphere is caused to stretch horizontally, by such as ridge-push or trench-pull. The lower, hotter part of the lithosphere will flow away from the main area being stretched, whilst the upper, cooler and more brittle crust will tend to fault. The combined effect of two mechanisms is for the Earths surface in the area of extension to subside, creating a geographical depression which is then often infilled with water and/or sediments. An example of a basin caused by lithospheric stretching is the North Sea – also an important location for significant hydrocarbon reserves, another such feature is the Basin and Range Province which covers most of the USA state of Nevada, forming a series of horst and graben structures. Another expression of lithospheric stretching results in the formation of basins with central ridges, The Red Sea is in fact an incipient ocean. The mouth of the Red Sea is also a triple junction where the Indian Ocean Ridge, Red Sea Rift. This is the place on the planet where such a triple junction in oceanic crust is exposed subaerially. The reason for this is twofold, due to a high thermal buoyancy of the junction, if a load is placed on the lithosphere, it will tend to flex in the manner of an elastic plate. The magnitude of the lithospheric flexure is a function of the load and the flexural rigidity of the lithosphere. Flexural rigidity is in itself, a function of the mineral composition, thermal regime. The nature of the load is varied, for instance, the Hawaiian Islands chain of volcanic edifices has sufficient mass to cause deflection in the lithosphere. Deformation of the lithosphere in the plane of the earth occurs as a result of near horizontal maximum and minimum principal stresses, the resulting zones of subsidence are known as strike-slip or pull-apart basins
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Erosion
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In earth science, erosion is the action of surface processes that remove soil, rock, or dissolved material from one location on the Earths crust, then transport it away to another location. Eroded sediment or solutes may be transported just a few millimetres, the rates at which such processes act control how fast a surface is eroded. Feedbacks are also possible between rates of erosion and the amount of eroded material that is carried by, for example. Processes of erosion that produce sediment or solutes from a place contrast with those of deposition, while erosion is a natural process, human activities have increased by 10-40 times the rate at which erosion is occurring globally. At well-known agriculture sites such as the Appalachian Mountains, intensive farming practices have caused erosion up to 100x the speed of the rate of erosion in the region. Excessive erosion causes both on-site and off-site problems, on-site impacts include decreases in agricultural productivity and ecological collapse, both because of loss of the nutrient-rich upper soil layers. In some cases, the end result is desertification. Off-site effects include sedimentation of waterways and eutrophication of bodies, as well as sediment-related damage to roads. Intensive agriculture, deforestation, roads, anthropogenic climate change and urban sprawl are amongst the most significant human activities in regard to their effect on stimulating erosion, however, there are many prevention and remediation practices that can curtail or limit erosion of vulnerable soils. Rainfall, and the surface runoff which may result from rainfall, produces four types of soil erosion, splash erosion, sheet erosion, rill erosion. Splash erosion is generally seen as the first and least severe stage in the erosion process. In splash erosion, the impact of a falling raindrop creates a crater in the soil. The distance these soil particles travel can be as much as 0.6 m vertically and 1.5 m horizontally on level ground. If the soil is saturated, or if the rate is greater than the rate at which water can infiltrate into the soil. If the runoff has sufficient flow energy, it will transport loosened soil particles down the slope, sheet erosion is the transport of loosened soil particles by overland flow. Rill erosion refers to the development of small, ephemeral concentrated flow paths which function as both sediment source and sediment delivery systems for erosion on hillslopes, generally, where water erosion rates on disturbed upland areas are greatest, rills are active. Flow depths in rills are typically of the order of a few centimetres or less and this means that rills exhibit hydraulic physics very different from water flowing through the deeper, wider channels of streams and rivers. Gully erosion occurs when water accumulates and rapidly flows in narrow channels during or immediately after heavy rains or melting snow
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Hydrology
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Hydrology is the scientific study of the movement, distribution, and quality of water on Earth and other planets, including the water cycle, water resources and environmental watershed sustainability. A practitioner of hydrology is a hydrologist, working within the fields of earth or environmental science, physical geography, geology or civil, Hydrology subdivides into surface water hydrology, groundwater hydrology, and marine hydrology. Domains of hydrology include hydrometeorology, surface hydrology, hydrogeology, drainage-basin management and water quality, oceanography and meteorology are not included because water is only one of many important aspects within those fields. Hydrological research can inform environmental engineering, policy and planning, the term hydrology comes from Greek, ὕδωρ, hýdōr, water, and λόγος, lógos, study. Chemical hydrology is the study of the characteristics of water. Ecohydrology is the study of interactions between organisms and the hydrologic cycle, hydrogeology is the study of the presence and movement of groundwater. Hydroinformatics is the adaptation of technology to hydrology and water resources applications. Hydrometeorology is the study of the transfer of water and energy between land and water surfaces and the lower atmosphere. Isotope hydrology is the study of the signatures of water. Surface hydrology is the study of processes that operate at or near Earths surface. Drainage basin management covers water-storage, in the form of reservoirs, water quality includes the chemistry of water in rivers and lakes, both of pollutants and natural solutes. Determining the water balance of a region, mitigating and predicting flood, landslide and drought risk. Real-time flood forecasting and flood warning, designing irrigation schemes and managing agricultural productivity. Part of the module in catastrophe modeling. Designing dams for water supply or hydroelectric power generation, designing sewers and urban drainage system. Analyzing the impacts of antecedent moisture on sanitary sewer systems, predicting geomorphologic changes, such as erosion or sedimentation. Assessing the impacts of natural and anthropogenic environmental change on water resources, assessing contaminant transport risk and establishing environmental policy guidelines. Hydrology has been a subject of investigation and engineering for millennia, for example, about 4000 BC the Nile was dammed to improve agricultural productivity of previously barren lands
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Biology
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Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, evolution, distribution, identification and taxonomy. Modern biology is a vast and eclectic field, composed of branches and subdisciplines. However, despite the broad scope of biology, there are certain unifying concepts within it that consolidate it into single, coherent field. In general, biology recognizes the cell as the unit of life, genes as the basic unit of heredity. It is also understood today that all organisms survive by consuming and transforming energy and by regulating their internal environment to maintain a stable, the term biology is derived from the Greek word βίος, bios, life and the suffix -λογία, -logia, study of. The Latin-language form of the term first appeared in 1736 when Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus used biologi in his Bibliotheca botanica, the first German use, Biologie, was in a 1771 translation of Linnaeus work. In 1797, Theodor Georg August Roose used the term in the preface of a book, karl Friedrich Burdach used the term in 1800 in a more restricted sense of the study of human beings from a morphological, physiological and psychological perspective. The science that concerns itself with these objects we will indicate by the biology or the doctrine of life. Although modern biology is a recent development, sciences related to. Natural philosophy was studied as early as the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indian subcontinent, however, the origins of modern biology and its approach to the study of nature are most often traced back to ancient Greece. While the formal study of medicine back to Hippocrates, it was Aristotle who contributed most extensively to the development of biology. Especially important are his History of Animals and other works where he showed naturalist leanings, and later more empirical works that focused on biological causation and the diversity of life. Aristotles successor at the Lyceum, Theophrastus, wrote a series of books on botany that survived as the most important contribution of antiquity to the plant sciences, even into the Middle Ages. Scholars of the medieval Islamic world who wrote on biology included al-Jahiz, Al-Dīnawarī, who wrote on botany, biology began to quickly develop and grow with Anton van Leeuwenhoeks dramatic improvement of the microscope. It was then that scholars discovered spermatozoa, bacteria, infusoria, investigations by Jan Swammerdam led to new interest in entomology and helped to develop the basic techniques of microscopic dissection and staining. Advances in microscopy also had a impact on biological thinking. In the early 19th century, a number of biologists pointed to the importance of the cell. Thanks to the work of Robert Remak and Rudolf Virchow, however, meanwhile, taxonomy and classification became the focus of natural historians
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Lithosphere
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A lithosphere is the rigid, outermost shell of a terrestrial-type planet or natural satellite that is defined by its rigid mechanical properties. On Earth, it is composed of the crust and the portion of the mantle that behaves elastically on time scales of thousands of years or greater. The outermost shell of a planet, the crust, is defined on the basis of its chemistry. Earths lithosphere includes the crust and the uppermost mantle, which constitute the hard, the lithosphere is subdivided into tectonic plates. The uppermost part of the lithosphere that chemically reacts to the atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere through the forming process is called the pedosphere. The lithosphere is underlain by the asthenosphere which is the weaker, hotter, the study of past and current formations of landscapes is called geomorphology. The concept of the lithosphere as Earth’s strong outer layer was described by A. E. H, love in his 1911 monograph Some problems of Geodynamics and further developed by Joseph Barrell, who wrote a series of papers about the concept and introduced the term lithosphere. The concept was based on the presence of significant gravity anomalies over continental crust and these ideas were expanded by Reginald Aldworth Daly in 1940 with his seminal work Strength and Structure of the Earth and have been broadly accepted by geologists and geophysicists. The temperature at which olivine begins to deform viscously is often used to set this isotherm because olivine is generally the weakest mineral in the upper mantle, the mantle part of the lithosphere consists largely of peridotite. The crust is distinguished from the mantle by the change in chemical composition that takes place at the Moho discontinuity. Oceanic lithosphere consists mainly of mafic crust and ultramafic mantle and is denser than continental lithosphere, oceanic lithosphere thickens as it ages and moves away from the mid-ocean ridge. This thickening occurs by conductive cooling, which converts hot asthenosphere into lithospheric mantle and causes the oceanic lithosphere to become increasingly thick, the thickness of the mantle part of the oceanic lithosphere can be approximated as a thermal boundary layer that thickens as the square root of time. H ∼2 κ t Here, h is the thickness of the mantle lithosphere, κ is the thermal diffusivity for silicate rocks. The age is equal to L/V, where L is the distance from the spreading centre of mid-oceanic ridge. Oceanic lithosphere is less dense than asthenosphere for a few tens of millions of years and this is because the chemically differentiated oceanic crust is lighter than asthenosphere, but thermal contraction of the mantle lithosphere makes it more dense than the asthenosphere. New oceanic lithosphere is constantly being produced at mid-ocean ridges and is recycled back to the mantle at subduction zones, geoscientists can directly study the nature of the subcontinental mantle by examining mantle xenoliths brought up in kimberlite, lamproite, and other volcanic pipes. The histories of these xenoliths have been investigated by many methods, such studies have confirmed that mantle lithospheres below some cratons have persisted for periods in excess of 3 billion years, despite the mantle flow that accompanies plate tectonics. Cryosphere Geosphere Kola Superdeep Borehole Plate tectonics Solid Earth Chernicoff, Stanley, Whitney, earths Crust, Lithosphere and Asthenosphere Crust and Lithosphere
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Hydrosphere
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The hydrosphere is the combined mass of water found on, under, and above the surface of a planet, minor planet or natural satellite. It has been estimated there are 1386 million cubic kilometers of water on Earth. This includes water in liquid and frozen forms in groundwater, oceans, lakes, saltwater accounts for 97. 5% of this amount. Fresh water accounts for only 2. 5%, of this fresh water,68. 9% is in the form of ice and permanent snow cover in the Arctic, the Antarctic, and mountain glaciers. 30. 8% is in the form of fresh groundwater, only 0. 3% of the fresh water on Earth is in easily accessible lakes, reservoirs and river systems. The total mass of the Earths hydrosphere is about 1.4 ×1018 tonnes, about 20 ×1012 tonnes of this is in Earths atmosphere. Approximately 75% of Earths surface, an area of some 361 million square kilometers, is covered by ocean, the average salinity of Earths oceans is about 35 grams of salt per kilogram of sea water. The hydrological cycle transfers water from one state or reservoir to another, reservoirs include atmospheric moisture, streams, oceans, rivers, lakes, groundwater, subterranean aquifers, polar icecaps and saturated soil. Solar energy, in the form of heat and light, most evaporation comes from the oceans and is returned to the earth as snow or rain. Sublimation refers to evaporation from snow and ice, transpiration refers to the expiration of water through the minute pores or stomata of trees. Evapotranspiration is the used by hydrologists in reference to the three processes together, transpiration, sublimation and evaporation. In his book Water, Marq de Villiers described the hydrosphere as a system in which water exists. The hydrosphere is intricate, complex, interdependent, all-pervading and stable, de Villiers claimed that, On earth, the total amount of water has almost certainly not changed since geological times, what we had then we still have. Water can be polluted, abused, and misused but it is neither created nor destroyed, there is no evidence that water vapor escapes into space. Every year the turnover of water on Earth involves 577,000 km3 of water and this is water that evaporates from the oceanic surface and from land. The same amount of falls as atmospheric precipitation,458,000 km3 on the ocean and 119,000 km3 on land. The difference between precipitation and evaporation from the surface represents the total runoff of the Earths rivers. These are the sources of fresh water to support life necessities
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Atmosphere
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An atmosphere is a layer of gases surrounding a planet or other material body, that is held in place by the gravity of that body. An atmosphere is likely to be retained if the gravity it is subject to is high. The atmosphere of Earth is mostly composed of nitrogen, oxygen, argon with carbon dioxide, the atmosphere helps protect living organisms from genetic damage by solar ultraviolet radiation, solar wind and cosmic rays. Its current composition is the product of billions of years of modification of the paleoatmosphere by living organisms. The term stellar atmosphere describes the region of a star. Stars with sufficiently low temperatures may form compound molecules in their outer atmosphere, Atmospheric pressure is the force per unit area that is applied perpendicularly to a surface by the surrounding gas. It is determined by a gravitational force in combination with the total mass of a column of gas above a location. On Earth, units of air pressure are based on the recognized standard atmosphere. It is measured with a barometer, the pressure of an atmospheric gas decreases with altitude due to the diminishing mass of gas above. The height at which the pressure from an atmosphere declines by a factor of e is called the height and is denoted by H. For such an atmosphere, the pressure declines exponentially with increasing altitude. However, atmospheres are not uniform in temperature, so the determination of the atmospheric pressure at any particular altitude is more complex. Surface gravity, the force that holds down an atmosphere, differs significantly among the planets, for example, the large gravitational force of the giant planet Jupiter is able to retain light gases such as hydrogen and helium that escape from objects with lower gravity. Thus, the distant and cold Titan, Triton, and Pluto are able to retain their atmospheres despite their relatively low gravities, rogue planets, theoretically, may also retain thick atmospheres. Since a collection of gas molecules may be moving at a range of velocities. Lighter molecules move faster than ones with the same thermal kinetic energy. It is thought that Venus and Mars may have lost much of their water when, after being photo dissociated into hydrogen and oxygen by solar ultraviolet, Earths magnetic field helps to prevent this, as, normally, the solar wind would greatly enhance the escape of hydrogen. However, over the past 3 billion years Earth may have lost gases through the polar regions due to auroral activity
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Biosphere
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The biosphere also known as the ecosphere, is the worldwide sum of all ecosystems. The two joined words are bio and sphere and it can also be termed as the zone of life on Earth, a closed system, and largely self-regulating. The biosphere is postulated to have evolved, beginning with a process of biopoiesis or biogenesis, more recently, in 2015, remains of biotic life were found in 4.1 billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia. According to one of the researchers, If life arose relatively quickly on Earth, then it could be common in the universe. In a general sense, biospheres are any closed, self-regulating systems containing ecosystems and this includes artificial biospheres such as Biosphere 2 and BIOS-3, and potentially ones on other planets or moons. The term biosphere was coined by geologist Eduard Suess in 1875, while the concept has a geological origin, it is an indication of the effect of both Charles Darwin and Matthew F. Maury on the Earth sciences. The biospheres ecological context comes from the 1920s, preceding the 1935 introduction of the ecosystem by Sir Arthur Tansley. Vernadsky defined ecology as the science of the biosphere and it is an interdisciplinary concept for integrating astronomy, geophysics, meteorology, biogeography, evolution, geology, geochemistry, hydrology and, generally speaking, all life and Earth sciences. Geochemists define the biosphere as being the sum of living organisms. In this sense, the biosphere is but one of four components of the geochemical model. When these four component spheres are combined into one system, it is known as the Ecosphere and this term was coined during the 1960s and encompasses both biological and physical components of the planet. The Second International Conference on Closed Life Systems defined biospherics as the science and technology of analogs and models of Earths biosphere, others may include the creation of artificial non-Earth biospheres—for example, human-centered biospheres or a native Martian biosphere—as part of the topic of biospherics. Every part of the planet, from the ice caps to the equator. The actual thickness of the biosphere on earth is difficult to measure, birds typically fly at altitudes as high as 1,800 m and fish live as much as 8,372 m underwater in the Puerto Rico Trench. Herbivorous animals at these elevations depend on lichens, grasses, microorganisms, under certain test conditions, have been observed to thrive in the vacuum of outer space. The total amount of soil and subsurface bacterial carbon is estimated as 5 ×1017 g, the mass of prokaryote microorganisms—which includes bacteria and archaea, but not the nucleated eukaryote microorganisms—may be as much as 0.8 trillion tons of carbon. Barophilic marine microbes have been found at more than a depth of 10,000 m in the Mariana Trench, in fact, single-celled life forms have been found in the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, by the Challenger Deep, at depths of 11,034 m. Culturable thermophilic microbes have been extracted from cores drilled more than 5,000 m into the Earths crust in Sweden, temperature increases with increasing depth into the Earths crust
40.
Denudation
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Endogenous processes such as volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics uplift and expose continental crust to the exogenous processes of weathering, erosion, and mass wasting. Denudation incorporates the mechanical, biological and chemical processes of erosion, weathering, denudation can involve the removal of both solid particles and dissolved material. These include sub-processes of cryofracture, insolation weathering, slaking, salt weathering, bioturbation, suspended load, bed load, and dissolved load are included in measurements. The weight of the load is converted to units and the load volume is divided by the area of the watershed above the gaging station. The result is an estimate of the wearing down of the Earths surface in inches or centimeters per 1000 years, in most cases no adjustments are made for human impact, which causes the measurements to be inflated. Denudation rates are much lower than the rates of uplift. The only areas at which there could be equal rates of denudation, early studies prompted the formation of denudation cycle hypotheses to describe land formations. Although at present they are mostly discounted, many of these models are enduring due to their simplicity and seemingly obvious assumptions. In the 1890s W. M. Davis proposed a cycle of wearing down in which so called young landscapes had high gradients and elevations, and waning, low elevation topography through middle age to old age. Landscapes of Britain and Wales were thought to reflect these multiple peneplanation and rejuvenation cycles, such as the 3, a number of assumptions of fluvial and glacial dynamics in temperate areas were made in the formation of this model. Such theories were proposed before tectonic theory was understood. Denudation exposes deep sub-volcanic structures on the present surface of the area where volcanic activity once occurred, sub-volcanic structures such as neck and dyke are exposed by denudation
41.
Sediment
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For sediment in beverages, see dregs. For example, sand and silt can be carried in suspension in water and on reaching the sea be deposited by sedimentation. Sediments are most often transported by water, but also wind, beach sands and river channel deposits are examples of fluvial transport and deposition, though sediment also often settles out of slow-moving or standing water in lakes and oceans. Desert sand dunes and loess are examples of transport and deposition. Glacial moraine deposits and till are ice-transported sediments, sediment can be classified based on its grain size and/or its composition. Sediment size is measured on a log base 2 scale, called the Phi scale, composition of sediment can be measured in terms of, parent rock lithology mineral composition chemical make-up. This leads to an ambiguity in which clay can be used as both a size-range and a composition, sediment is transported based on the strength of the flow that carries it and its own size, volume, density, and shape. Stronger flows will increase the lift and drag on the particle, causing it to rise, rivers and streams carry sediment in their flows. This sediment can be in a variety of locations within the flow and these relationships are shown in the following table for the Rouse number, which is a ratio of sediment fall velocity to upwards velocity. If the upwards velocity is less than the settling velocity, but still high enough for the sediment to move, it will move along the bed as bed load by rolling, sliding. If the upwards velocity is higher than the velocity, the sediment will be transported high in the flow as wash load. As there are generally a range of different particle sizes in the flow, sediment motion can create self-organized structures such as ripples, dunes, antidunes on the river or stream bed. These bedforms are often preserved in rocks and can be used to estimate the direction. Overland flow can erode soil particles and transport them downslope, the erosion associated with overland flow may occur through different methods depending on meteorological and flow conditions. If the initial impact of rain droplets dislodges soil, the phenomenon is called rainsplash erosion, if overland flow is directly responsible for sediment entrainment but does not form gullies, it is called sheet erosion. If the flow and the substrate permit channelization, gullies may form, glaciers carry a wide range of sediment sizes, and deposit it in moraines. The overall balance between sediment in transport and sediment being deposited on the bed is given by the Exner equation and this expression states that the rate of increase in bed elevation due to deposition is proportional to the amount of sediment that falls out of the flow. This can be localized, and simply due to obstacles, examples are scour holes behind boulders, where flow accelerates
42.
Deposition (geology)
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Deposition is the geological process in which sediments, soil and rocks are added to a landform or land mass. Deposition can also refer to the buildup of sediment from organically derived matter or chemical processes, for example, chalk is made up partly of the microscopic calcium carbonate skeletons of marine plankton, the deposition of which has induced chemical processes to deposit further calcium carbonate. Similarly, the formation of coal begins with deposition of material, mainly from plants. The null-point hypothesis explains how sediment is deposited throughout a shore profile according to its grain size and this is due to the influence of hydraulic energy, resulting in a seaward-fining of sediment particle size, or where fluid forcing equals gravity for each grain size. The concept can also be explained as sediment of a particular size may move across the profile to a position where it is in equilibrium with the wave, figure 1 illustrates this relationship between sediment grain size and the depth of the marine environment. The relatively strong onshore stroke of the forms a eddy or vortex on the lee side of the ripple, provided the onshore flow persists. Where there is symmetry in ripple shape the vortex is neutralised and this creates a cloudy water column which travels under tidal influence as the wave orbital motion is in equilibrium. R is the radius of the object, ρ is the mass density of the fluid, g is the gravitational acceleration, Cd is the drag coefficient. When the fluid becomes more viscous due to grain sizes or larger settling velocities, prediction is less straight forward. Cohesion of sediment occurs with the grain sizes associated with silts and clays. Akaroa Harbour is located on Banks Peninsula, Canterbury, New Zealand and this research shows conclusive evidence for the null point theory existing on tidal flats with differing hydrodynamic energy levels and also on flats that are both erosional and accretional. Kirby R. Cheniers can be found at any level on the foreshore and this is because sediment grain size analysis throughout a profile allows inference into the erosion or accretion rates possible if shore dynamics are modified. Planners and managers should also be aware that the environment is dynamic. Cementation Cross-bedding Drift Flocculation Longshore drift Overbank Sedimentary rock Sedimentary structures Settling Shields parameter Stokes law Superficial deposits
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Orography
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Orography is the study of the topographic relief of mountains, and can more broadly include hills, and any part of a regions elevated terrain. Orography falls within the discipline of geomorphology. Mountain ranges and elevated land masses have a impact on global climate. In scientific models, such as general models, orography defines the lower boundary of the model over land. When a rivers tributaries or settlements by the river are listed in orographic sequence and this method of listing tributaries is similar to the Strahler Stream Order, where the headwater tributaries are listed as category 1. Orographic precipitation, also known as relief precipitation, is generated by a forced upward movement of air upon encountering a physiographic upland. This lifting can be caused by two mechanisms, The upward deflection of large scale horizontal flow by the orography, the anabatic or upward vertical propagation of moist air up an orographic slope caused by daytime heating of the mountain barrier surface. Upon ascent, the air that is being lifted will expand, if enough water vapor condenses into cloud droplets, these droplets may become large enough to fall to the ground as precipitation. Drier air is left on the descending, generally warming, leeward side where a shadow is formed. Terrain-induced precipitation is a factor for meteorologists as they forecast the local weather. Orography can play a role in the type, amount, intensity. Researchers have discovered that barrier width, slope steepness and updraft speed are major contributors for the optimal amount, computer model simulations for these factors showed that narrow barriers and steeper slopes produced stronger updraft speeds which, in turn, enhanced orographic precipitation. Leeward coastal areas are especially dry—less than 20 in per year at Waikiki—and the tops of moderately high uplands are especially wet—about 475 in per year at Waialeale on Kauai. This is particularly noticeable between Manchester and Leeds where Leeds receives less due to a rain shadow of 12 miles from the Pennines. Coverage Orographic lift Map of the Orography of Europe from Euratlas. com
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Climate change feedback
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Feedback in general is the process in which changing one quantity changes a second quantity, and the change in the second quantity in turn changes the first. Positive feedback amplifies the change in the first quantity while negative feedback reduces it, the term forcing means a change which may push the climate system in the direction of warming or cooling. An example of a climate forcing is increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, by definition, forcings are external to the climate system while feedbacks are internal, in essence, feedbacks represent the internal processes of the system. Some feedbacks may act in isolation to the rest of the climate system, others may be tightly coupled. Forcings, feedbacks and the dynamics of the system determine how much. The main positive feedback in global warming is the tendency of warming to increase the amount of vapor in the atmosphere. Some observed and potential effects of global warming are positive feedbacks, there have been predictions, and some evidence, that global warming might cause loss of carbon from terrestrial ecosystems, leading to an increase of atmospheric CO2 levels. Several climate models indicate that global warming through the 21st century could be accelerated by the response of the carbon cycle to such warming. All 11 models in the C4MIP study found that a fraction of anthropogenic CO2 will stay airborne if climate change is accounted for. By the end of the twenty-first century, this additional CO2 varied between 20 and 200 ppm for the two models, the majority of the models lying between 50 and 100 ppm. The higher CO2 levels led to an additional climate warming ranging between 0. 1° and 1.5 °C, however, there was still a large uncertainty on the magnitude of these sensitivities. Eight models attributed most of the changes to the land, while three attributed it to the ocean, the strongest feedbacks in these cases are due to increased respiration of carbon from soils throughout the high latitude boreal forests of the Northern Hemisphere. One model in particular indicates a secondary carbon cycle feedback due to the loss of much of the Amazon Rainforest in response to reduced precipitation over tropical South America. While models disagree on the strength of any terrestrial carbon cycle feedback, results such as this rely on a dense sampling network and thus are not available on a global scale. Extrapolating to all of the United Kingdom, they estimate annual losses of 13 million tons per year and this is as much as the annual reductions in carbon dioxide emissions achieved by the UK under the Kyoto Treaty. It has also suggested that the release of dissolved organic carbon from peat bogs into water courses constitutes a positive feedback for global warming. The carbon currently stored in peatlands is over half the amount of carbon already in the atmosphere, tree deaths are believed to be increasing as a result of climate change, which is a positive feedback effect. This contradicts the previously held view that increased natural vegetation would lead to a negative-feedback effect
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Erosion and tectonics
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The interaction between erosion and tectonics has been a topic of debate since the early 1990s. While the tectonic effects on processes such as erosion have long been recognized. The primary questions surrounding this topic are what types of interactions exist between erosion and tectonics and what are the implications of these interactions, the interaction of these processes can form, modify, or destroy geomorphic features on the Earth’s surface. The term tectonics refers to the study of the Earths surface structure, tectonic processes typically occur at plate boundaries which are one of three types, convergent boundaries, divergent boundaries, or transform boundaries. The topography, and general relief, of a given area determines the velocity at which surface runoff will flow, longer, steeper slopes are more prone to higher rates of erosion during periods of heavy rainfall than shorter, gradually sloping areas. Thus, large ranges, and other areas of high relief. Understanding the principle of isostasy is a key element to understanding the interactions, isostatic uplift is both a cause and an effect of erosion. When deformation occurs in the form of crustal thickening an isostatic response is induced causing the thickened crust to sink, the resulting surface uplift leads to enhanced elevations, which in turn induces erosion. Alternatively, when a large amount of material is eroded away from the Earths surface uplift occurs in order to maintain isostatic equilibrium, because of isostasy, high erosion rates over significant horizontal areas can effectively suck up material from the lower crust and/or upper mantle. This process is known as isostatic rebound and is analogous to Earths response following the removal of large ice sheets. Isostatic uplift and corresponding erosion are responsible for the formation of geologic features as well as localized structures. Two such examples include, Continental shields- Generally large areas of low relief in the Earths crust where Precambrian crystalline igneous, initially, a mountain belt is formed at a convergent plate margin. This process of erosion followed by isostatic adjustment continues until the system is at isostatic equilibrium, at this point large-scale erosion can no longer occur because the surface has eroded down to nearly sea-level and uplift ceases due to the systems state of equilibrium. River anticlines- Geologic structures formed through the uplift of rock underlying confined areas of high erosion. Isostatic rebound resulting from the removal of overlying rock, via erosion. In order for the development of structures to occur the erosion rate of the river must exceed both the average erosional rate of the area, and the rate of uplift of the orogen. The two factors influencing the development of structures are stream power of the associated river and the flexural rigidity of the crust in the area. The combination of increased power with decreased flexural rigidity results in the systems progression from a transverse anticline to a river anticline
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Moraine
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A moraine is any glacially formed accumulation of unconsolidated glacial debris that occurs in both currently and formerly glaciated regions on Earth, through geomorphological processes. Moraines are formed from debris previously carried along by a glacier, lateral moraines are formed at the side of the ice flow and terminal moraines at the foot, marking the maximum advance of the glacier. Other types of moraine include ground moraines, till-covered areas with irregular topography, moraines may be composed of debris ranging in size from silt-sized glacial flour to large boulders. The debris is typically sub-angular to rounded in shape, moraines may be on the glacier’s surface or deposited as piles or sheets of debris where the glacier has melted. Moraines may form through a number of processes, depending on the characteristics of sediment, the dynamics on the ice, moraine forming processes may be loosely divided into passive and active. Passive processes involve the placing of chaotic supraglacial sediments onto the landscape with limited reworking and these moraines are composed of supraglacial sediments from the ice surface. Active processes form or rework moraine sediment directly by the movement of ice and these form push moraines and thrust-block moraines, which are often composed of till and reworked proglacial sediment. Moraine may also form by the accumulation of sand and gravel deposits from glacial streams emanating from the ice margin and these fan deposits may coalesce to form a long moraine bank marking the ice margin. Several processes may combine to form and rework a single moraine, moraines can be classified either by origin, location with respect to a glacier or former glacier, or by shape. Some moraine types are only from ancient glaciers, while medial moraines of valley glaciers are poorly preserved. Lateral moraines are parallel ridges of debris deposited along the sides of a glacier, the unconsolidated debris can be deposited on top of the glacier by frost shattering of the valley walls and/or from tributary streams flowing into the valley. The till is carried along the glacial margin until the glacier melts, lateral moraines stand high because they protect the ice under them from the elements, causing it to melt or sublime less than the uncovered parts of the glacier. Multiple lateral moraines may develop as the glacier advances and retreats, ground moraines are till-covered areas with irregular topography and no ridges, often forming gently rolling hills or plains. They are accumulated at the base of the ice as lodgment till, in alpine glaciers, ground moraines are often found between the two lateral moraines. Ground moraines may be modified into drumlins by the overriding ice, Rogen moraines or ribbed moraines are a type of basal moraines that form a series of ribs perpendicular to the ice flow in an ice sheet. The depressions between the ribs are sometimes filled with water, making the Rogen moraines look like tigerstripes on aerial photographs, Rogen moraines are named after Lake Rogen in Härjedalen, Sweden, the landform’s type locality. End moraines, or terminal moraines, are ridges of unconsolidated debris deposited at the snout or end of the glacier and they usually reflect the shape of the glaciers terminus. Glaciers act much like a belt, carrying debris from the top of the glacier to the bottom where it deposits it in end moraines
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