The course is aimed at introducing the student to the objectives and thematics the Morphotectonics deals with, following a teaching program which will address the problems raised by the recognition of the Quaternary tectonics clues and the main tools and methods to address them.
Concepts pertaining to various disciplines (geomorphology, structural geology, geochronology, stratigraphy) will be recalled in the perspective of their use in investigating the competitive relationship between surface processes and tectonics in order to attain, when possible, to differentiate the two components and relative rates.
The main geomorphic markers, relative deformation patterns and their use in various morphogenetic contexts will be introduced and described as well as their response to tectonic activity and/or combination with surface processes driven by the main Quaternary climate changes.
The main (absolute) dating methods useful to provide time constraints of the geomorphic markers will be recalled, and the strategies to infer from them the deformation rates will be exposed. The feedback processes between climate and tectonics, and the relationships between uplift- and erosion/denudation rates, as well as the methodologies used to calculate them, will be described together with notes on the physics of the phenomena that rule them.
The landscape evolution led by the tectonic 'forcing', will be studied at different time scales as a consequence of the different responses to the deformation events, and depending they belong to more impulsive categories (at Holocene scale) or to multiple cycles of interaction between deformation and erosion processes (Quaternary).
Finally, the theoretical aspects behind the quantitative analysis of the river’s erosion processes and of longitudinal profiles will be addressed, together with the fluvial pattern's interaction with active tectonics and the deriving transients. The concepts on the geomorphic markers introduced at the beginning of the course, and the geomorphic indices used to identify clues of active tectonics, will be re-interpreted in a longer-term deformation context, in order to consider averaged deformation rates which take into account even erosion processes induced by the number of climatic/eustatic fluctuations occurred in the Quaternary.
