Why Take a Course in Geomorphology?
Human travelers from Tatshenshini Man, the 500 year old Alaska Native recovered from the Tatshenshini Glacier to Juneauites turning onto the UAS campus after passing Auke Lake, have utilized landforms as guides to get over passes to the next watershed, to follow river valleys to commercial trading centers, to cross deserts by using dune orientation or to navigate oriented tundra snow sasstrugi, and to locate oases or hunting sites. Mariners have found their coastal port cities by recognizing prominent headlands and bays from the sea. Ancient Hawaiians have left their footprints in lava flows as they crossed newly cooling landscapes while fleeing adversaries. The "Hunt for Osama bin Laden" has at times utilized the knowledge of cave geomorphologists to identify his possible hideouts in Afghanistan. Military campaigns have relied on landscape knowledge to surprise and overwhelm the enemy. The Jet Propulsion Lab rovers still ! operating on Mars, (Spirit and Opportunity), are remotely controlled from Pasadena, California by planetary geomorphologists, geologist, rocket scientists and engineers.

Seventy five percent of our Earth is covered with liquid water. Solar energy drives the active hydrosphere on our "planet ocean" that allows for continuous resurfacing and landscape development in response to climate change through time. The Earth's geothermal energy drives vertical and horizontal crustal changes, renewing eroded landforms through tectonic uplift and creating depositional areas through subsidence. The timescales or process rates controlling landscape formation are inversely proportional to the size of the landform in question. Mountains are deformed over timescales of 1 to 30 million years. Glaciers and ice sheets wax and wane over time periods of tens, to hundreds, to thousands, to tens of thousands of years. Fault scarps are created by earthquakes, submarine landslides, terrestrial avalanches and mudflows. They can generate deadly tsunamis and are created in seconds to minutes.

The Earth's geoid or equipotential gravity surface is equal to mean sea level and defines the ultimate base level for our planet's geomorphic processes. In this class we will also explore how landscapes have developed on other planetary bodies such as our moon, Mars, Venus, and Europa where internal planetary energy may be negligible and no liquid water exists on the surface.

Humans are now a geomorphic force on this planet. We are directly causing an increase in the rate and extent of landscape resurfacing by our activities of land disturbance through agriculture, mining, road building, paving of urban areas, and logging. Our fossil fuel burning is changing the climate, diminishing surface ice and generating landscape and ecological responses as Earth's albedo changes in polar regions, as plant communities change their geographic distribution, as increased weathering and stream erosion redistributes topsoils, and sea level rises to drown low-lying coastal areas. The discipline of geomorphology will provide you with the tools to quantitatively understand these processes and the changes they create in order to live wisely with the realities of flowing water under the force of gravity on our dynamic planetary surface.