The epeirogenic portions of continents (i.e., those that have escaped orogenesis in the past 500 million years) experience denudation in a situation in which the slope factor, if at all tectonic in origin, is regional in expression and so gentle as to exert little influence beyond giving direction to flowing water or ice. It is these regions that variously exhibit veneers of sedimentary rock largely accumulated in epicontinental seas over the past 500 million years or that expose in shield areas the roots of worn-down mountain systems. In the absence of notable tectonism, it is not surprising to find that morphogenesis on stable cratons is dominated by climate. Vast expanses of cratons situated away from mountain belts either are occupied by temperate and tropical forests and grasslands or are seared by desert heat and wind. Only Antarctica currently supports a continental ice sheet, but both North America and Eurasia show they recently did so as well. It is in these epeirogenic regions that morphogenesis is most significantly punctuated by climate change. With few exceptions, the landforms are polygenetic. Many of the most recent glacial deposits scarcely show the incipient soil development begun under humid conditions only a few thousand years ago. Furthermore, broadly forested, humid regions still exhibit patches of cacti and alluvium left there when they were deserts. Therein, the notable slopes are denudational in origin; the steeper ones were usually developed by stream incision and the more gentle ones commonly were produced by alluviation and/or pedimentation.

Behaviour of geomorphic systems

Gravity-driven geomorphic systems are potentially cyclical in terms of the elimination of excess relief and elevation. They exhibit activity that graphs in a two-phase form—namely the initial disequilibrium occurring when free energy and relief are maximal (and the results are frequently catastrophic), and subsequent dynamic equilibrium where relief and elevation are nearly eliminated and free energy available to do work is so low that change is nearly imperceptible. The latter behaviour is clearly gradualistic. Such systems must be disturbed by outside forces in order for the cycle to be interrupted or reinitiated.

In the solar system the cycle of accretionary, gravity-propelled impact morphogenesis that creates cratered surfaces and high relief is in a distinctly waning phase. Such activity apparently reached a peak within the first 1 billion years after the planetary system was formed and is not likely to be renewed. Its expression is epitomized by the surface of objects such as the Moon and the planet Mercury, where the near absence of endogenic tectonic forces has left impact effects most intact. On the Earth and a few other planets (or satellites), internal heating propels orogenesis and thereby periodically renews gravity-driven geomorphic cycles. As noted earlier, there will be only one continent-forming cycle in the history of the Earth.

Radiation-driven geomorphic systems are tied to the Sun’s nuclear fusion processes and the fluctuations therein. Because of atmosphere and organisms, solar effects are most singularly manifested on the Earth as morphogenetic areas characterized by a particular climate and associated processes. The geomorphic changes in such areas are cyclical largely with respect to the destruction of relict features exposed to the system as the morphogenic areas move and also with respect to the creation of landforms and deposits in morphological equilibrium with the new system. Changes in landforms, deposits, and processes also graph in two phases after the initiation of a system or after a perturbation in one. These landform changes are initially time-indicative, and unless morphogenesis has attained a dynamic equilibrium phase, the partially altered relict features may permit reconstruction of the events of landform evolution.

It will be noted from the above that there is a close relationship between process and form in the dynamic equilibrium phase of radiationally driven geomorphic systems. In morphogenetic areas in states of disequilibrium, form (strongly influenced by relict features) may show little or no consistency with process, which may have just been initiated. Relict features in the process of transformation, such as a desert or a glacial alluvial deposit in a valley being reworked by a perennial stream, thus constitute hybrid features. Compare with Davis’s mature stream discussed above, the stream valley of which has a flat floor unlike that of a late-phase humid valley which has a V-shaped cross profile. Furthermore, the “hybrid” stream is not behaving as it would if there were no alluvium, and the alluvium is not the same after the stream has partially reworked it.

Occasionally, the sequence of geomorphic events may conspire to preserve a form that is foreign to the associated geomorphic system and processes. The sinuous paths of entrenched meanders that are cut into bedrock in such regions as the Appalachians express the granular surface and sediment-water volume relations that prevailed when the flow pattern was initiated in the Mesozoic rather than those of the present.