Mountain ranges and other large-scale features of Earth’s surface set basic patterns of climate, ecology, hydrology, and even culture. Most of us view such features as static geographic boundary conditions or possibly as monuments to some esoteric episode of ancient Earth history. But over geologic time scales, mountains and landscapes are as dynamic and ephemeral as clouds, piling up and rising, deforming, and dissipating over space and time. Just as clouds manifest the influence of the surface on atmospheric processes such as air convection, so landscapes express how the surface affects dynamic deep-Earth processes such as mantle convection.
Most landscape evolution involves deformation of Earth’s lithosphere—the crust and upper mantle, typically about 100 km thick—and erosion of its surface. In regions where tectonic plates converge, for example, faults or other localized crustal deformation can drive bedrock upward relative to some suitably fixed datum such as sea level. That, in turn,...
