Pathological Geomorphology | Extreme, Excessive & Bizarre Landforms

Pathological GeomorphologySaskatchewan Delta

Pathological Geomorphology is a new blog dedicated to images of ‘extreme, bizarre, incredible, shocking, or otherwise intriguing landscapes and landforms of the Earth’. Its creator Kyle House, a geologist specializing in Fluvial Geomorphology, Paleohydrology, and Quaternary Stratigraphy, created the blog after scouring Google Earth, and other similar online services for images of interesting land assemblages. As Kyle notes in his first blog post these landforms are to him pathological in the sense of ‘being developed or expressed in such a degree that they are extreme, excessive, or markedly abnormal’.

This blog has been drawn to such formations, and more particularly the generative processes behind them as illustrated in recent blog posts such as The Uncritical Solitonic Undulations of Barchan Sand Dunes or The Slot Valleys of Antelope Canyon as a Hydro-Dynamic Computation.

While we very much welcome the term ‘Pathological’, alluding as it does to those corporeal textures of diseased tissue as found in Atlases of Pathology, Dataisnature prefers to refer to the computational rather than the medical in mentioning these formations. Being pattern enthusiasts and adhering to notions of Pancomputationlism our eyes focus on the emergent patterns, algorithmic distributions and generative processes behind such land form exotica.

The site acts as a wonderful catalogue of geo-vignettes with compelling annotations and leads to more treasure. Expect to find images of parabolic sand dunes advancing through a small rural community, a river delta in Spain taking the form of a cartoon-like bird, plus multiple folding of Palaeozoic sediments in Algeria to create radial concentric patterns.

Aside from ‘pathologies’ created by ‘natural causes’ you can expect to find the symptoms of diseases inflicted on earth resulting from environmental issues such as the persistent effect of treated waste water in the delta of the Las Vagas Wash.

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