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A slope which falls down to a deep valley on its western side and a shallower one on its eastern side has a westerly aspect or is a west-facing slope. The direction a slope faces can affect the physical and biotic features of the slope, known as a slope effect .
Topography is the study of the forms and features of land surfaces. The topography of an area may refer to the landforms and features themselves, or a description or depiction in maps. Topography is a field of geoscience and planetary science and is concerned with local detail in general, including not only relief , but also natural ...
The topography, or relief, is characterized by the inclination , elevation, and orientation of the terrain . Topography determines the rate of precipitation or runoff and the rate of formation or erosion of the surface soil profile. The topographical setting may either hasten or retard the work of climatic forces. [60]
Landforms are categorized by characteristic physical attributes such as elevation, slope, orientation, structure stratification, rock exposure, and soil type.Gross physical features or landforms include intuitive elements such as berms, cliffs, hills, mounds, peninsulas, ridges, rivers, valleys, volcanoes, and numerous other structural and size-scaled (e.g. ponds vs. lakes, hills vs. mountains ...
Soils geomorphologists investigate soil profiles and chemistry to learn about the history of a particular landscape and understand how climate, biota, and rock interact. Other geomorphologists study how hillslopes form and change. Still others investigate the relationships between ecology and geomorphology. Because geomorphology is defined to ...
A soil profile is one face of a pedon, or an imaginary three-dimensional unit of soil that would display the full range of properties characteristic of a particular soil. Pedons generally occupy between 1 and 10 m 2 of surface land area and are the fundamental unit of field-based soil study. [9]
A catena forms when the climate, including precipitation and evaporation, is the same for the whole slope, and when sufficient time has passed for equilibrium to be reached between the processes that bring materials in to a facet and the processes that take materials away. The result is a predictable sequence of soil facets. [10]
Slope or grade measures how steep the terrain is at any point on the surface, deviating from a horizontal surface. In principle, it is the angle between the gradient vector and the horizontal plane, given either as an angular measure α (common in scientific applications) or as the ratio p = r i s e r u n {\displaystyle p={\frac {rise}{run ...