Coastal Landforms and Landscapes

Abstract

Coastal geomorphology is the study of coastal landforms and their evolution over time. In this topic, we set the scene for discussing the variety of coastal landforms and landscapes and the major climatic and oceanic forces that shaped them during their geologic history. First, we briefly explore landforms along ice coasts, which have an extent of some tens of thousands of kilometres, either as floating shelf ice of Antarctica or calving glacier fronts of Greenland, Alaska or Chile. We then continue with coastal forms dominated by endogenic signatures like faulting, folding or jointing, or which are of volcanic origin and partly drowned by sea level rise in the warm period of today’s climate.