What is relief? We define the concept

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:45

Can you answer the question of what is relief? At first glance, this is not difficult, and every student would cope with this task. Everyone knows that it is with this word that we used to call the area around us: mountains, plains, depressions, hills and cliffs. However, let's try to give a more precise and detailed definition, based on scientific terms.

What is relief? General definition of the concept

The very word "relief" in modern Russian came from French. However, according to linguists, its roots go back to ancient Latin, where the verb "relevo" meant "raise", "ex alt", "rise". Today it is a combination of all the irregularities, but not only the land, but also the seas and oceans. Reliefs can vary considerably in their shape, nature of origin, size, history of development and age, but in general they can be divided into positive, which are also called convex, and negative, or concave.

Macrorelief is a rather extensive land area that can stretch for tens and hundreds of kilometers. Examples include plateaus, plains, river basins, and mountain ranges.

To the microreliefinclude sinkholes, small dunes, road embankments, small mounds and gullies. In a word, all the irregularities, the height differences of which do not exceed a few meters.

Besides this, scientists distinguish mesorelief and nanorelief. The first type includes hollows, ridges, hills, valley terraces, slopes, dunes and beams, the second type includes arable furrows, ruts located on country roads, as well as mole emissions.

The main landforms in general are mountains and plains. It is about them that we will discuss further.

What is relief? Mountains

The nature of the relief of this type implies a positive shape of the terrain, which is characterized by a sharp rise of an isolated object on a relatively flat surface. In this case, the slopes, foot and peaks should be pronounced.

The features of the relief of this type are most often considered by the appearance of the peaks, and they, in turn, are domed, peaked, plateau-like and others. It should be noted that very often, it would seem, such land areas familiar to us as islands, in fact, turn out to be the tops of seamounts.

What is relief? Plains

The category under consideration should be understood not only as areas of land, but also the bottom of lakes, seas and oceans, which are characterized by slight slopes of the terrain, on average up to 5 °, and small fluctuations in height, up to approximately 200 meters.

According to statistics, the plains on our planetoccupy most of the area - in general, about 64%, and the largest is the lowland belonging to the Amazon River, covering more than 5 million km².

Taking into account the absolute heights, these landforms are low-lying, elevated, upland, as well as plateaus.

If we talk about external processes, it can be noted that there are two types of plains: denudation and accumulative. The first were formed as a result of the destruction of rocks, and the second - with the accumulation of various kinds of sedimentary deposits.