6 Space, Time and the Mountain - How Do We Order What We See?

Abstract

The spatial and temporal scales of the principal perceived phenomena have severely constrained the development of geomorphology as a science. The scales of ordinary human perception at which nineteenth-century naturalists attempted to understand the landscape gave way only after about 1950 to the scales of classical mechanics. This chiefly meant constraining space scales to make them commensurable with observable time scales, so that the subject in recent decades has been dominated by considerations of 'dynamical ' or 'process ' geomorphology There has been no confrontation of the basic question of scales at which we may expect to observe consistent patterns in data, how these patterns may be expressed, and what- consequently- constitute useful modes of explanation. In this chapter, I attempt to develop this theme. I recognise four distinctive modes of theory construction. At small space and time scales, phenomena are recorded in sequences which describe very large numbers of characteristic events. Descriptions are statistical, and processes are considered to be stochastic. At the scales of classical mechanics, deterministic theories are sustainable. At still larger scales, system evolution

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