In late-nineteenth-century geomorphology, William Morris Davis proposed a deterministic "geographical cycle," positing that youthful, uplifted landforms inevitably progress through distinct stages toward a featureless plain termed a "peneplain." Davis assumed that tectonic uplift occurs in brief, rapid pulses followed by prolonged crustal quiescence, permitting subaerial denudation to systematically reduce topographic relief over time. In contrast, Grove Karl Gilbert conceptualized landforms not as historical sequences governed by duration, but as dynamic equilibria produced by the concurrent interaction of resisting lithological structures and erosive forces. Gilbert maintained that landscape adjustments occur continuously as local energy gradients shift, indicating that a steady-state morphology could persist indefinitely if the rate of tectonic uplift equals the pace of denudational transport. Although prevailing geological consensus favored Davis’s paradigm—partly due to its pedagogical simplicity and sweeping descriptive typology—Gilbert’s equilibrium hypothesis was revived in the mid-twentieth century, when quantitative hydrological studies demonstrated that river networks often maintain stable longitudinal profiles irrespective of their supposed developmental stage.
Based on the passage, which of the following statements regarding landscape morphology is most strongly supported by the text?
- ADavis’s model predicts that regions experiencing continuous, uninterrupted crustal uplift will develop into peneplains more rapidly than regions subject to intermittent uplift.
- BNineteenth-century geologists rejected Gilbert’s equilibrium hypothesis primarily because laboratory simulations disproved the existence of steady-state river gradients.
- Under Gilbert’s framework, two topographically identical landscapes could have experienced substantially different durations of active denudation.Cevap
- DMid-twentieth-century hydrological measurements confirmed that the total volume of sediment transported by rivers is entirely independent of tectonic uplift.
- EDavis’s theory implies that the rate of subaerial denudation consistently surpasses the rate of tectonic uplift during the initial youthful stage of landscape evolution.