Mountains, valleys, deserts, canyons, caves, plains, and plateaus reveal the varied shape of Earth’s surface. Their distinctive forms develop through tectonic activity, volcanism, weathering, erosion, deposition, and other geological forces.
About 40,000 stone columns meet the sea on the north coast of Northern Ireland. From above, their polygonal tops resemble paving blocks; along the cliffs, the same rocks appear as organ pipes. Their regularity can look engineered, but the Giant’s Causeway is a natural record of heat escaping from...
The fluted sides of Devils Tower resemble a bundle of enormous stone pillars. Many rise for hundreds of feet, and some are wide enough to dwarf a person. They were not built upward one at a time, however. The columns are pieces of a once-continuous mass of molten rock that fractured as it lost heat...
Uluru looks self-contained: a single red mass rising abruptly from an open plain. That appearance has made it one of the landforms most often described as a monolith. Yet the familiar label can create the wrong geological picture. Uluru is not an enormous loose boulder placed on the desert floor,...
Table Mountain rises above Cape Town as a broad horizontal platform bordered by cliffs. Its highest point reaches about 1,086 meters, while the conspicuous northern plateau extends roughly three kilometers from side to side. The summit appears almost engineered, yet no single event sliced the...
Denali’s summit elevation of 6,190 meters makes it North America’s highest mountain, but its most striking dimension begins far below the summit. The surrounding lowlands and glacier-fed valleys lie at comparatively modest elevations. From terrain near 600 meters above sea level, the mountain rises...
K2 rises as a steep-sided pyramid rather than a broad mountain dome. At 8,611 meters, it is the Karakoram’s highest summit and Earth’s second-highest point above sea level. Yet elevation alone does not convey its form. The peak stands roughly 3,600 meters above its immediate glacial base, with...
Mount Everest is not a finished monument. Its bedrock summit stands 8,848.86 meters above sea level according to the joint height announced by Nepal and China in 2020, but that figure describes one measurement in a moving landscape. The crust beneath the Himalayas continues to deform, rivers strip...