Ancient Landforms

The formation of landforms by erosion, earth movements and volcanic activity has traditionally been thought of as geologically recent, often confined to the past few thousand years, the ice age, or perhaps the last two million years.This book extends the time scale back and describes volcanic landscapes 30 and 50 million years old, 40 million year old caves, river patterns that were in existence before the break-up of the proto-continent Gondwanaland and gold deposits that were emplaced at the time of the dinosaurs.Besides minor landforms such as hills, valleys and coasts, major features of the earth are examined, such as continents and oceans, island arcs and mountain ranges. The long history of such topics as continental drift, glaciation and sea level change are related to the evolution of the earth's landscapes.This long-term view of landscape evolution, on the same time scale as continental drift, biological evolution and the formation of ore deposits, leads to a re-assessment of many basic ideas of landscape formation, and of earth science in general.