Paul S. Hossfeld and His Contribution to Geomorphology

Abstract

The received wisdom was and is that landscapes cannot be more than a few millions of years old. Nevertheless, consideration of local geology and age of sediments in adjacent basins convinced Paul S. Hossfeld that the summit surface of low relief preserved on the northern Mount Lofty Ranges of South Australia resulted from long-continued planation and that it is of Cretaceous age; that is, some 70 million years old. Hossfeld's apparently intuitive suggestion that very old landscapes exist, recorded in his graduate thesis but not further pursued by him, is the earliest known statement of this idea.