64 PUTNAM 



submergence. His classification becomes extremely difficult to apply in a military sense, be- 

 cause it forces the user to make a decision— namely, did this coast rise or sink or remain 

 static with respect to sea level— that has little relevance to the problem at hand, which is the 

 determination of those characteristics of a given coast that are of strategic significance. 

 Secondly, the classification itself encounters difficulty because sea level is such an inconstant 

 datum— the last significant change has been a world-wide rise following the melting of the con- 

 tinental ice caps at the end of the Pleistocene. This has had the practical effect of making 

 almost all the shorelines of the world ones of submergence. 



An outgrowth, in part, of Johnson's classification, but a much broader extension of it, is 

 a recent book by Valentin, "Die Kiisten der Erde." Valentin set up a four-fold approach to 

 coastal morphology, recognizing that there are dynamic processes operating within the earth 

 itself. Some forces tend to elevate parts of the earth's crust, others to depress it. Operating 

 in conjunction with these forces are processes of erosion and deposition which also may cause 

 a shoreline either to advance or to recede. The result is a four-component system that treats 

 land loss or land gain as the resultant of emergence, submergence, construction, and destruc- 

 tion. Unfortunately, the complex interplay of those self-same components is difficult if not im- 

 possible to determine in relation to the appearance of most of the world's coasts. In applica- 

 tion, then, Valentin's scheme has difficulties similar to Johnson's classification.^ 



In contrast, we have attempted to set up a classification in which the matter of problem- 

 solving might be cut to a minimum, and in which we could arrive at a common means of com- 

 munication so that people of widely ranging backgrounds end up speaking a common language. 

 This means we should avoid loaded terms, terms that mean different things to different people, 

 or terms that have lost all meaning because they have been bandied around so much they no 

 longer have any special significance. 



We are confronted by the fact that we live on a globe, that it has different climates, and 

 that the effects of these climates are expressed in different ways in a pattern often recognizable 

 on the surface of the earth. Of all these secondary effects, the most visible is the carpet of 

 vegetation. If, for example, we take the simplest of all landforms, a plain, then I think all of us 

 know how different that plain will look on aerial photographs depending upon its environmental 

 situation. An arctic plain has an entirely different appearance and complex of operating prob- 

 lems than a tropical plain. 



The accompanying tables are the outgrowth of an as yet uncompleted attempt to recognize 

 these environmental factors and arrive at a workable coastal classification that will include all 

 the elements of our scheme. The first table (Fig. 1) is a classification of those coastal types 

 that are determined by the major landforms present in the coastal strip extending some 5 to 10 

 miles inland. For that reason the character of the gross structure involved is indicated in the 

 names of the coastal types, which stand out in bold letters. The agents shaping these structures 

 are listed across the top of the table, where they are grouped according to broad zones of cli- 

 matic influence. The two dominant agents, ice and running water, are given the leading positions. 



Obviously some of the processes and landforms do not conform ideally to such a simplifi- 

 cation as this, and examples of these are the work of the wind, of organisms, and lastly the re- 

 sults of processes originating within the earth, such as volcanism. But at least I believe that 

 we can resolve most of the coastal landforms of the world into a relatively small number of 

 structural types that can be placed in climatically controlled environments. 



It is now our hope— and this is only a progress report— that we have evolved a system 

 that appears to be working and which fits the facts. If this is the case, ouf next move will be 

 to reduce the classification to a symbolic code that can be used to represent the leading coastal 

 landforms of the world on a map at a scale of approximately 1:25,000,000. 



For example, a pattern of closely-spaced horizontal green lines within the dotted outline 

 of a coast will tell the user that this is a plain, very nearly at sea level, underlain by layered 



Since this talk was given, an excellent summary and review of the entire problem of coastal 

 classification has been written by C. A. Cotton, "Deductive Morphology and Genetic Classifica- 

 tion of Coasts," Scientific Monthly, Vol. 78, pp. 163-181, 1954. 



