| Summary: | From north to south in Germany there is a rough symmetry in the distribution of the major geological and landform units. Quaternary glacial and fluvioglacial deposits and landforms characterize the Northern Lowlands and the Alpine Foreland in the south. Relief in both these areas is relatively flat, mostly of the order of a few tens of metres to 200 metres. The central part of the country, roughly between a line from Bonn–Dortmund–Hannover–Leipzig–Dresden in the north and the river Danube in the south, is dominated by uplands and basins, mainly consisting of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic rocks, exhibiting a relief of several hundred metres. This central region is bordered in the western and eastern part by fault block mountains and massifs consisting of Palaeozoic, partly crystalline rocks. These massifs attain heights of c.500–1,500 m. Based on a combination of morphotectonic evolution and landform associations, most authors distinguish five major landform regions: • The North German Lowlands as a part of the North European Lowlands, extending from the north-western tip of France, through Belgium and The Netherlands to the Polish–Russian border and beyond. The southern border of this region more or less coincides with the 100–200 m contour lines as well as with the maximum extension of the Fennoscandian ice sheets. The usual thickness of the glacial/fluvioglacial sediment sequence is between 100 and 300 m; the maximum thickness is almost 500 m. In contrast to Ahnert (1989b), the Lower Rhine graben and the Munster Embayment are included in this region by Semmel (1996) and Liedtke and Marcinek (2002). • The Central German Uplands. This region is characterized by a relief between 200 and 1,000 m, locally to 1,500 m, old Palaeozoic (Variscan) massifs, denudational landforms with planation surfaces, cuestas, hogbacks, basins, and deeply incised river valleys. Concerning the southern border of this region there also appears to be some difference of opinion. Semmel (1996) obviously includes the Saar-Nahe Upland and the ...
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