Geography and Geomorphology: The Last Fifty Years

Abstract

Largely by historical accident, geomorphology in Britain became detached from geology and located as it were by default in geography, the move occurring in the earlier part of the present century. Numbers of North American departments of geography, by contrast, abandoned the physical side altogether. Relations between physical and human geography in Britain appear to be friendly, but not especially constructive. The geomorphological establishment in Britain during the 1950s resisted the quantitative revolution; it appeared to be completely unaware of the network, geometric, and hydraulic revolutions. All three revolutions were effected in the U.S.A., the last two within geology; geology also contributed very strongly to the quantification of geomorphology. If geomorphology should be located within a single traditional discipline, that discipline ought surely to be geology; but discussions of disciplinary location have been largely by-passed by the general quantitative revolution of the natural sciences (and of part of the arts), by the growth of inter- disciplinary research, and by the knowledge explosion, the result of which is that traditional departments are now too small for what they must do. With the hydraulic revolution some 25 years in the past, we should be due for another sudden burst of change. One distinct possibility is that this will entail a drastic revision of our views on typical rates of denudation, and the views of some of us on climatic geomorphology. The pioneering work is already being done in Australia.