Learning Outcomes:
Students will gain an appreciation of the relationship between asking research-oriented questions and the identification of both the data and data-collection techniques appropriate to answering those questions.
Indicative Module Content:
Remember, geomorphology is about forms (landforms), materials (the stuff landforms are made of) and processes - both the active processes ongoing as you observe and the relict processes that you can only infer (not observe directly) from properties of the forms and materials making-up the Earth's surface. From your data collected in the field, you will be able to make statements about the active processes (e.g. fluvial processes like discharge, critical bed shear, bank erosion) and relict processes (e.g. what the channel and overbank sediments, the channel sediments and forms, the floodplain sediments and forms [like terraces] and the valley-side sediments/materials [e.g. bedrock, glacial deposits and peat] and forms that together comprise the landscape of Glenmacnass tell you about the evolution of the valley from the past to the present, including the context of the broader environment in which the valley was operating and evolving).
So, your first job is to describe the forms and materials that together make a distinctive landscape. Next, you need to describe the active processes operating in the valley and you need to compare and contrast them with the palaeo-processes that you can infer from the landforms and sediments in the valley. If you do these things, you will be able to infer (make statements about the present and the past based on proxies for processes no longer directly observable) what has changed over space (from site to site) and over time. Finally, by applying all these new insights gained from your field experience, you will be able to assess how/where/when Glenmacnass converged and/or diverged from the readings you based your predictive document upon, by comparing and contrasting your field-based data and insights with your predictions. Your new, field-based understanding of the valley's evolution over space and through time (backed-up now by hard data) will allow you not just to see those convergences and divergences with the literature but also to explain those characteristics.