What is relief? We define the concept

Can you answer the question about what a relief is? At first glance, there is nothing complicated in this, and every schoolboy would cope with this task. Everyone knows that it is this word that we are accustomed to call the surrounding area: mountains, plains, hollows, hills and cliffs. However, let's try to give a more precise and detailed definition, based on scientific terms. What is relief? The 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 "to lift," "extol," "to rise." For today it is a set of all irregularities, but not only land, but also seas and oceans. Reliefs can vary considerably in their outlines, nature of origin, size, history of development and age, but in general they can be divided into positive ones, which are also called convex, and negative, or concave.

Macro-relief is a fairly extensive area of land, which can stretch for tens and hundreds of kilometers. Examples include highlands, plains, river basins and mountain ranges.

The microrelief includes funnels, small dunes, road embankments, small hillocks and rills. In a word, all irregularities, elevations of which do not exceed several meters.

In addition, the scientists distinguish still the mesorelief and the nanorelief. The first type includes troughs, ridges, hills, valleys terrains, slopes, dunes and beams, to the second - arable furrows, tracks on country roads, and worm emissions.

The main forms of relief as a whole are mountains and plains. It is about them that we will go further.

What is relief? The mountains The nature of the relief of this species implies a positive form of the terrain, for which a sharp rise of an isolated object on a relatively flat surface is characteristic. In this case, the slopes, foothills and peaks should be pronounced.

The features of the relief of this species are most often considered in terms of the appearance of the vertices, and they, in turn, are dome-shaped, piciform, plate-like and others. It should be noted that very often, it would seem, such habitual areas of land for us as the islands, in fact, are the summits of the seamounts.

What is relief? Plains

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

According to statistics, the plains on our planet occupy most of the area - a total of about 64%, and the largest is the lowland, belonging to the Amazon River, covering more than 5 million km ².

Taking into account the absolute heights, these forms of relief are low, elevated, upland, as well as plateaus.

If we talk about external processes, it can be noted that the plains are of two types: denudation and accumulation. The first were formed due to the destruction of rocks, and the latter - due to the accumulation of various sedimentary deposits.