Using morphospaces to understand tafoni development

Tafoni research has tended to focus on issues around definition and differences rather than trying to develop general concepts for understanding the nature of tafoni. This paper uses the concepts of fitness landscapes and morphospaces to develop a standardized and dimensionless phase space within wh...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Published in:Geomorphology
Main Authors: Inkpen, Rob, Hall, Kevin John
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/2263/56258
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geomorph.2016.03.003
Description
Summary:Tafoni research has tended to focus on issues around definition and differences rather than trying to develop general concepts for understanding the nature of tafoni. This paper uses the concepts of fitness landscapes and morphospaces to develop a standardized and dimensionless phase space within which to represent, visualize and analyze a dataset of 800 tafoni collected from Antarctica. Within this phase space it is possible to identify clustering of tafoni forms and to illustrate how tafoni development is constrained by a relational hierarchy of rock structure, processes and geometry or form. South African NRF. http://www.elsevier.com/locate/geomorph 2017-05-31 hb2016 Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology