Climatic geomorphology

Climatic geomorphology is the study of the role of climate in shaping landforms and the earth-surface processes. An approach used in climatic geomorphology is to study relict landforms to infer ancient climates. Being often concerned about past climates climatic geomorphology considered sometimes to be an aspect of historical geology. Since landscape features in one region might have evolved under climates different from those of the present, studying climatically disparate regions might help understand present-day landscapes. For example, Julius Büdel studied both cold-climate processes in Svalbard and weathering processes in tropical India to understand the origin of the relief of Central Europe, which he argued was a palimpsest of landforms formed at different times and under different climates. The various subbranches of climatic geomorphology focus on specific climatic environments. Desert geomorphology or the geomorphology of arid and semi-arid lands shares many landforms and processes with more humid regions. One distinctive feature is the sparse or lacking vegetation cover, which influences fluvial and slope processes, related to wind and salt activity. Early work on desert geomorphology was done by Western explorers of the colonies of their respective countries in Africa (French West Africa, German South West Africa, Western Egypt), in frontier regions of their own countries (American West, Australian Outback) or in the deserts of foreign countries such as the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire and China. Since the 1970s desert geomorphology in Earth has served to find analogues to Martian landscapes. As a discipline periglacial geomorphology is close but different to Quaternary science and geocryology. Periglacial geomorphology is concerned with non-glacial cold-climate landforms in areas with and without permafrost. Albeit the definition of what a periglacial zone is not clear-cut a conservative estimate is that a quarter of Earth's land surface has periglacial conditions.