Can you answer the question of what is a relief? At first glance, this is nothing complicated, and each student would have coped with this task. Everyone knows that it is with this word that we are used to calling the area surrounding us: mountains, plains, hollows, hills and cliffs. However, let's try to give a more accurate and detailed definition based on scientific terms.
What is a relief? General definition of the concept
The very word "relief" in modern Russian came from French. However, according to linguistic scholars, its roots go back to ancient Latin, where the verb “relevo” meant “lift”, “extol”, “rise”. Today it is the totality of all the bumps, but not only land, but also the seas and oceans. Reliefs can vary significantly in shape, nature of origin, size, developmental history and age, but in general they can be divided into positive, which are also called convex, and negative, or concave.
The macrorelief is a fairly vast tracts of land that can span tens or hundreds of kilometers. Examples include plateaus, plains, river basins, and mountain ranges.
The microrelief includes funnels, small dunes, road embankments, small mounds and ravines. In a word, all irregularities, the height differences of which do not exceed several meters.
In addition, scientists also distinguish mesorelief and nanorelief. The first type includes hollows, ridges, hills, terraces of valleys, slopes, dunes and gullies, the second - arable furrows, ruts located on country roads, as well as mole emissions.
The main forms of relief as a whole are mountains and plains. It is about them that we will discuss further.
What is a relief? The mountains
The nature of the relief of this species implies a positive form of terrain, which is characterized by a sharp rise in an isolated object on a relatively flat surface. In this case, the slopes, foots and peaks should be pronounced.
The features of the relief of this species are most often considered by the appearance of precisely the peaks, and they, in turn, are domed, peak-like, plateau-like and others. It should be noted that very often, it would seem, such habitual sections of land, like islands, actually turn out to be the tops of seamounts.
What is a relief? The plains
Under this category should be understood not only land areas, but also the bottom of lakes, seas and oceans, which are characterized by slight slopes, on average up to 5 °, and small fluctuations in altitude, up to about 200 meters.
According to statistics, the plains on our planet occupy a large part of the area - in general, about 64%, and the largest is the lowland belonging to the Amazon River, covering more than 5 million km².
Given the absolute heights, these landforms are low, 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 former formed as a result of the destruction of rocks, and the latter due to the accumulation of various kinds of sediment.
