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How can climate change leave relict landforms and deposits in a landscape?
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continental landform
Davis's proposed landscape-development states. The morphology shown is not actually time-indicative. For example, A could be a gully system in soft sediment or a canyon such as the Royal Gorge in Colorado, which is millions of years old. The ridge-ravine topography of B would normally develop under humid conditions, but the river meandering on alluvium indicates a prior or extraneous non-humid aggrading mechanism. The riverine plain of C implies a complex history of planation and aggradation in a current fluvial mode.
Climate change influences the landscape by creating relict landforms, which are remnants of ancient environments that persist in the modern landscape after climatic conditions have shifted. Because Earth's climate has changed significantly over millions of years, many landscapes function as "palimpsests," containing a mix of features formed under past climates alongside those shaped by modern processes.12
Climate change leaves these marks through several mechanisms:
- Glacial Legacy: During the Quaternary, extensive glaciation sculpted high-latitude and alpine regions, leaving behind erosional features like fjords and valleys, as well as depositional landforms such as moraines, eskers, and kames. These features remain as evidence of past ice sheets even after the glaciers have retreated.34
- Hydrological Shifts: Changes in humidity lead to the abandonment of drainage systems or the formation of terraces as rivers adjust to new flow regimes. Similarly, strandlines may be left behind as sea levels or lake levels fluctuate.14
- Aridity and Eolian Processes: Shifts toward drier climates can leave behind fixed sand dunes or loess deposits that no longer actively form under current conditions.13
These features allow geomorphologists to reconstruct past environmental states, such as tropical planation or periglacial activity, which continue to influence the modern topography.2