German Uplands and Alpine Foreland

From north to south in Germany there is a rough symmetry in the distribution of the major geological and landform units. Quaternary glacial and fluvioglacial deposits and landforms characterize the Northern Lowlands and the Alpine Foreland in the south. Relief in both these areas is relatively flat, mostly of the order of a few tens of metres to 200 metres. The central part of the country, roughly between a line from Bonn–Dortmund–Hannover–Leipzig–Dresden in the north and the river Danube in the south, is dominated by uplands and basins, mainly consisting of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic rocks, exhibiting a relief of several hundred metres. This central region is bordered in the western and eastern part by fault block mountains and massifs consisting of Palaeozoic, partly crystalline rocks. These massifs attain heights of c.500–1,500 m. Based on a combination of morphotectonic evolution and landform associations, most authors distinguish five major landform regions: • The North German Lowlands as a part of the North European Lowlands, extending from the north-western tip of France, through Belgium and The Netherlands to the Polish–Russian border and beyond. The southern border of this region more or less coincides with the 100–200 m contour lines as well as with the maximum extension of the Fennoscandian ice sheets. The usual thickness of the glacial/fluvioglacial sediment sequence is between 100 and 300 m; the maximum thickness is almost 500 m. In contrast to Ahnert (1989b), the Lower Rhine graben and the Munster Embayment are included in this region by Semmel (1996) and Liedtke and Marcinek (2002). • The Central German Uplands. This region is characterized by a relief between 200 and 1,000 m, locally to 1,500 m, old Palaeozoic (Variscan) massifs, denudational landforms with planation surfaces, cuestas, hogbacks, basins, and deeply incised river valleys. Concerning the southern border of this region there also appears to be some difference of opinion. Semmel (1996) obviously includes the Saar-Nahe Upland and the Thüringer Wald, the Erzgebirge, the Bayerischer Wald, and Böhmer Wald. This is also the case with the geomorphic map in the Nationalatlas by Liedtke et al. (2003). Liedtke and Marcinek (2002), however, do not include the Saar-Nahe Upland nor the Bayerischer Wald and Böhmer Wald.

Fractals in physical geography

Since the fractal concept was introduced to measuring coastline length over three decades ago, fractal analysis has been prolifically applied to many topographic studies. A number of mathematical algorithms are now available to determine the fractal dimension for both linear and areal features. These determination methods require one or more straight-line segments to fit the Richardson's plot. A close examination of the literature shows that not all topographic features are fractal at all scales studied. While the multifractal nature of some geographical phenomena has been explored in great depth, it is not completely understood why some terrains are better modelled with fractal geometry than others. Fractal analysis has been successfully used to measure and characterize irregular linear features such as coastlines and shorelines, to describe and characterize landforms, and to delineate landform regions statistically. Fractal analysis can also be used to produce terrain simulations with a known dimension against which hypotheses can be tested. These studies fail to link fractal dimensions to the underlying geomorphic processes. The failure stems from the fact that there is no one-to-one relationship between geomorphic processes and the landforms they shape.