Walther Penck

Penck is noted for criticizing key elements of the Davisian cycle of erosion, concluding that the process of uplift and denudation occur simultaneously, at gradual and continuous rates.

[1] The areas he studied in detail and based his theories on include the Black Forest in Germany, Puna de Atacama in Argentina and Anatolia in modern Turkey.

[3][4] During the 1920s Penck, with Siegfried Passarge, Alfred Hettner and his father, was the foremost figure in a broad German opposition to the "geographical cycle" theory of William Morris Davis.

As he may have told you, I have enjoyed reading parts of his Argentine monograph, an able piece of work, and I have written asking him to specify the difficulties he finds in accepting the cycle theory.

[3] His book, Morphological Analysis of Landforms, was published posthumously in 1924 by his father as was also his paper Die Piedmontflächen des südlichen Schwarzwald (The piedmont-flats of the southern Black Forest).

Geographer Martin Simons claimed in 1962 that Davis misunderstood and mis-translated parts of the paper leaving a distorted view of Penck's ideas among later workers.

Mountains of the Black Forest where Walther Penck studied the effects of doming on geomorphology.
Sierra de Famatina in Argentina interpreted as part of a grossfalt by Penck. [ 10 ]