Geomorphology Degree
There are a number of universities across the USA that are ready to offer you aŃ‚ opportunity to get a degree in geology including courses on geomorphology these days. Geomorphology is the subdiscipline of the geologic courses that is concerned with understanding the form of the Earth’s land surface and the processes by which it is shaped at the present day and in the past.
The latter, as it has evolved since the end of the XIX century, has become an interdisciplinary study that draws on areas as diverse as plate tectonics, ecology, and meteorology. Geomorphology studies the shaping of landforms, through such processes as subsidence and uplift, and with the classification and study of such landforms as mountains, volcanoes, and islands.
The Term “Geomorphology”
The term “geomorphology” comes from the Greek words geo, or “Earth,” and morph, meaning “form”. It was coined in 1893 by the American geologist William Morris Davis. He is considered the father of geomorphology.
During Davis’s time, geomorphology was concerned with classifying different structures on Earth’s surface, examples of which include mountains and islands, discussed later in this essay. This view of geomorphology as an essentially descriptive, past-oriented area of study closely aligned with historical geology and mineralogy prevailed throughout the late XIX and early XX centuries.
By the mid-twentieth century the concept of geomorphology inherited from Davis had fallen into disfavor, to be replaced by a paradigm, or model, oriented toward physical rather than historical geology. These 2 principal branches of geology are concerned, in the first instance, with Earth’s past and the processes that shaped it and, in the second instance, with Earth’s current physical features and the processes that continue to shape it.