Climate and landforms are intimately tied together. Indeed, much of geomorphology is concerned with how landforms, climate, and other surficial processes (like erosion) interact. Landforms are often studied to understand past climates, and vice versa. Thus, a complete understanding of landform genesis requires knowledge of past climates, generally termed paleoclimate.

Climate can be viewed as the prevailing weather/atmospheric conditions for a site, but over long timescales. If a geomorphologist was interested in how sand dunes in a modern desert migrate, they might look at climate over the last few decades. However, a geomorphologist interested in the origin and evolution of the entire desert would need to examine climate over tens of thousands, or even millions, of years. Thus, climate is a somewhat slippery concept, especially when one considers that climate is always changing.

Water, in all its forms, is the most important agent responsible for shaping the landscape. Some water is at the surface in rivers and lakes (surface water), but much of it eventually penetrates underground. Groundwater, present in the pore spaces of soil, regolith, and bedrock, plays a fundamental role in our lives, and (a focus of this chapter) in the dissolution of bedrock, which is perhaps the most important geomorphic effect of groundwater. Because all rocks are at least partially soluble, parts (or all) of them will dissolve and go into solution when exposed to water and its associated acids – the essence of dissolution (Fig. 12.1).

Glaciers are perennial bodies of ice and snow whose movement is driven by gravity. They vary greatly in size and morphology; most glaciers cover small areas of a mountain slope, while the largest glaciers cover entire continents! Glaciers interact with the lithosphere as they erode their beds, depressing the land below them as they grow, and allowing the lithosphere to rebound as they shrink. Along the way, glaciers are effective agents of rock weathering, erosion, transport, and deposition, and important sources of water.

Glaciers add to the natural beauty of mountain and continental landscapes, both in currently glaciated landscapes and in relict landscapes formed during past ice ages. Nonetheless, their ice and water can also pose deadly hazards.

Glacial systems include the glacier and its adjacent lakes, streams, and landscapes – a system that is also closely linked to the atmosphere.

Ice sheets have dramatically shaped the landscape across the northern regions of North America and Europe. Ice sheets are so vast that they are sometimes referred to as continental glaciers. Their deposits have directly influenced human history by rerouting river systems and by providing nutrient-rich parent materials for soils. Abundant lakes and rivers, many of which were newly formed by the ice, became early transportation arteries and supplied aquatic resources to early cultures. Indirectly, glacial sediments were transported by wind to form thick and extensive blankets of loess – home to many of the world’s best soils. Ice sheets reduced the overall relief of the landscape, as valleys were widened and filled, providing for ease of transportation, growth of agriculture, and the rise of civilizations.

Mountains are among the most prominent and inspiring landforms on Earth. Earth’s internal (tectonic, or endogenic) and external (surface, or exogenic) processes have conspired to produce a wealth of mountainous landscapes that span almost every region of our planet. No strict definition of a mountain exists, other than they rise abruptly and prominently above the surrounding land, usually in the form of peaks and ridges. Thus, mountains have considerable local relief. Some mountains may rise only a few hundred meters above sea level (asl), such as the highest mountain in the United Kingdom, Ben Nevis (1,099 m asl [above sea level]). Nonetheless, it is one of the most formidable mountains in the Scottish Highlands (Fig. 6.1A). Other mountains are far more prominent. Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth at 8,849 m asl (Fig. 6.1B), is undoubtedly the most famous of all mountains.

Now equipped with broader participant samples and more diverse stimuli, we can create Big Data experiments. This chapter reviews research methods involved in running Big Data surveys and experiments. The chapter discusses overt and covert measurements that we can collect via online experiments. The chapter then discusses practical logistics to keep in mind when running a Big Data experiment, including experimental design decisions, and a behind-the-scenes look at how data is saved online via server-side coding. Next, once you have the data from an experiment, how do you clean the data and how do you visualize it? The chapter ends with discussion on the ethical implications of collecting covert measures and the useful applications of web-coding skills to create public-facing websites.

Strong interactions are, well, strong. You have hadrons interacting and breaking up into a huge number of other hadrons. It is hard to understand what is going on. Physicists stumbled along during the 1960s trying out many ideas (the key words here are current algebra, analytic S-matrix, Regge trajectories and string theory) without much real understanding.

The term periglacial describes areas subject to repeated freezing and thawing and the processes associated with the growth of ice within soil and rock. Although originally referring to processes and climates adjacent to glaciers, “periglacial” now applies more broadly to cold-climate processes where frost action predominates. Earth’s cold, periglacial landscapes span both polar regions and many high elevation and mountainous areas. These landscapes are unlike any others, with ice-formed landforms such as pingos (Fig. 20.0) ice-wedge polygons, sorted circles, and rock glaciers found only in these cold landscapes.

In Chapter 1, we invited you to consider the critical potential of social work: the potential for us as individual workers, and collectively as a profession, to question the social conditions and discourses that give rise to human suffering and what we might do about these. The critical standpoint is one that sensitises us to social injustice and the need for transformation. Being a critical practitioner is challenging: while we may decide that this is the path we wish to take, it is an ongoing process, borne out in day-to-day and week-to-week activities. Becoming a critical practitioner is not a single act of commitment, but an often-arduous journey of revelation and struggle. There are many potential setbacks along this journey. As the words of a great twentieth-century social reformer Martin Luther King remind us, ‘Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable … Every step towards the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concerns of dedicated individuals.’ Critical social workers are among those dedicated individuals with passionate concerns.

The Lagrangian for the charge and neutral currents of the Standard Model contains fermion fields, what we call matter – leptons and quarks – and their interaction with spin-1 fields. These spin-1 fields are the W-, Z- and γ-bosons. As will become clear as I proceed, these fields are at the very center of the definition of the Standard Model as a gauge theory.

“Marvelous is the working of our world!” N. Gogol, Nevsky Prospect, 1835 Should this have been the first chapter? Where to start from in teaching the Standard Model? The data painfully collected by experiments are the basis of everything – but they would be mute were it not for our models and theories. On the other hand, it seems that our brain is not very good at working all by itself. It needs the gentle prodding of experimental data, of finding out how (real) things are. Without external inputs, our mind is easily led astray, going round in circles (often of narrower and narrower radius).

From the Blue Ridge overlook in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, USA, one can see the broad Shenandoah Valley, split by Massanutten Mountain, with more ridges and valleys in the distance (Fig. 9.1). This view of the Appalachian ridges and valleys provides a classic example of an eroded fold and thrust belt, where parallel ridges of hard, resistant rocks are separated by valleys underlain by comparatively softer rocks. Fold and thrust belt topography develops on folded bedrock structures called anticlines and synclines (Fig. 9.2). But this type of geologic structure is not without a long back-story. Most of the folded rocks underlying these mountains were originally deposited as flat-lying sediments, hundreds of millions of years ago. The folding occurred much later, driven by compressive forces associated with continental collision. Millions of years of subsequent erosion on these rocks were then required to give us the landscapes we see today.