Plain

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For other uses, see Plain (disambiguation).
Mount Ararat in the Caucasus, with the Ararat plain in foreground.

In geography, a plain is a flat, sweeping landmass that generally does not change much in elevation. Plains occur as lowlands along the bottoms of valleys or on the doorsteps of mountains, as coastal plains, and as plateaus or uplands.[1]

In a valley, a plain is enclosed on two sides but in other cases a plain may be delineated by a complete or partial ring of hills, by mountains or cliffs. Where a geological region contains more than one plain, they may be connected by a pass (sometimes termed a gap). Coastal plains would mostly rise from sea level until they run into elevated features such as mountains or plateaus.[2]

Plains are one of the major landforms on earth, where they are present on all continents, and would cover more than one-third of the world’s land area.[3] Plains may have been formed from flowing lava, deposited by water, ice, wind, or formed by erosion by these agents from hills and mountains. Plains would generally be under the grassland (temperate or subtropical), steppe (semi-arid), savannah (tropical) or tundra (polar) biomes. In a few instances, deserts and rainforests can also be plains.[4]

Plains in many areas are important for agriculture because where the soils were deposited as sediments they may be deep and fertile, and the flatness facilitates mechanization of crop production; or because they support grasslands which provide good grazing for livestock.[5]

Types of plain[edit]

A small, incised alluvial plain from Red Rock Canyon State Park (California).
A flood plain in the Isle of Wight.
  • Structural plains are relatively undisturbed horizontal surfaces of the Earth. They are structurally depressed areas of the world that make up some of the most extensive natural lowlands on the Earth's surface.[6]
  • Erosional plains have been leveled by various agents of denudation such as running water, rivers, wind and glacier which wear out the rugged surface and smoothens them. Plain resulting from the action of these agents of denudation are called peneplains (almost plain) while plains formed from wind action are called pediplains.[7]
  • Depositional plains formed by the deposition of materials brought by various agents of transportation such as rivers, wind, waves, and glaciers. Their fertility and economic relevance depend greatly on the types of sediments that are laid down.[8]

Depositional plains[edit]

  • Alluvial plains, formed by rivers, and may be one of these overlapping types:
    • Alluvial plain, formed over a long period of time by a river depositing sediment on its flood plain or bed which becomes alluvial soil. The difference between a flood plain and an alluvial plain is that the flood plain represents the area experiencing flooding fairly regularly in the present or recently, whereas an alluvial plain includes areas where the flood plain is now and used to be, or areas which only experience flooding a few times a century.[9]
    • Flood plain, adjacent to a stream, river, lake or wetland that experiences occasional or periodic flooding.
    • Scroll plain, a plain through which a river meanders with a very low gradient.
  • Lacustrine plain, a plain that originally formed in a lacustrine environment, that is, as the bed of a lake.[10]
  • Lava plain, formed by sheets of flowing lava.[11]
  • Glacial plains, formed by the movement of glaciers under the force of gravity:
    • Sandur (plural sandar), a glacial out-wash plain formed of sediments deposited by melt-water at the terminus of a glacier. Sandar consist mainly of stratified (layered and sorted) gravel and sand.[12][13]
    • Till plain, a plain of glacial till that forms when a sheet of ice becomes detached from the main body of a glacier and melts in place depositing the sediments it carries. Till plains are composed of unsorted material (till) of all sizes.
  • Abyssal plain, a flat or very gently sloping area of the deep ocean basin.[14]
  • Planitia, the Latin word for plain, is used in the naming of plains on extraterrestrial objects (planets and moons), such as Hellas Planitia on Mars or Sedna Planitia on Venus.

Notable examples[edit]

See also: Category: Plains by country
Nineveh Plains (Bozan, Iraq)
View of Fields at Biccavolu, Eastern coastal plains, Andhra Pradesh, India
Yilan Plain, Taiwan
View of the South Småland peneplain at Store Mosse National Park in Sweden.
North Somerset Levels taken from Dolebury Warren, England, UK
Terrain near the central German town of Fulda.
The Wallachian Plain, in the southern part of Argeş County.
View of Messara from the hill of Phaestus, Greece
View of the Cumberland Plain bushland in Western Sydney, Australia.
The Kakanui Range dominates the eastern horizon of the Maniototo Plain
Curry County, eastern New Mexico, on the North American Great Plains
Los llanos, an area of land with relatively high relief in Venezuela

Asia[edit]

Western Asia[edit]

South Asia[edit]

Eastern Asia[edit]

Europe[edit]

Northern Europe[edit]

Central Europe[edit]

Eastern Europe[edit]

Southern Europe[edit]

Oceania[edit]

Australia[edit]

New Zealand[edit]

Americas[edit]

North America[edit]

Central and South America[edit]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Rood, Stewart B.; Pan, Jason; Gill, Karen M.; Franks, Carmen G.; Samuelson, Glenda M.; Shepherd, Anita (2008-02-01). "Declining summer flows of Rocky Mountain rivers: Changing seasonal hydrology and probable impacts on floodplain forests". Journal of Hydrology. 349 (3–4): 397–410. doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2007.11.012. 
  2. ^ Whittow, John (1984). Dictionary of Physical Geography. London: Penguin, 1984, p. 467. ISBN 0-14-051094-X.
  3. ^ Geoff C. Brown; C. J. Hawkesworth; R. C. L. Wilson (1992). Understanding the Earth (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 93. ISBN 0-521-42740-1. 
  4. ^ Gornitz, Vivien (ed.). 2009. Encyclopedia of Paleoclimatology And Ancient Environments. Springer: Dordrecht, p. 665.
  5. ^ Powell, W. Gabe. 2009. Identifying Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) Using National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) Data as a Hydrologic Model Input for Local Flood Plain Management. Applied Research Project, Texas State University.
  6. ^ "Pediplain". Encyclopedia Britannica. 
  7. ^ Migoń, Piotr (2004). "Planation surface". In Goudie, A.S. Encyclopedia of Geomorphology. pp. 788–792. 
  8. ^ Jones, David K.C. (2004). "Denudation chronology". In Goudie, A.S. Encyclopedia of Geomorphology. pp. 244–248. 
  9. ^ "Glossary of Landform and Geologic Terms" (PDF). National Soil Survey Handbook—Part 629. National Cooperative Soil Survey. April 2013. Retrieved 17 August 2016. 
  10. ^ United States. Department of Conservation. Division of Geology. Glacial Sluceways and Lacustrine Plains of Southern Indiana. By William D. Thornburry. Bloomington: n.p., 1950. Web. <https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/205/B04.pdf?sequence=1>.
  11. ^ "Lava Plateaus". Retrieved 2014-01-26. 
  12. ^ Magilligan F.J., Gomez B., Mertes L.A.K., Smith, L.C. Smith N.D., Finnegan D., Garvin J.B., Geomorphic effectiveness, sandur development, and the pattern of landscape response during jökulhlaups: Skeiðarársandur, southeastern Iceland, Geomorphology 44 (2002) 95–113
  13. ^ Smith L.C., Sheng Y., Magilligan F.J., Smith N.D., Gomez B., Mertes L., Krabill W.B., Garven J.B., Geomorphic impact and rapid subsequent recovery from the 1996 Skeiðarársandur jökulhlaup, Iceland, measured with multi-year airborne lidar. Geomorphology vol. 75 Is. 1-2 (2006) 65-75
  14. ^ N.G. Vinogradova (1997). "Zoogeography of the Abyssal and Hadal Zones". Advances in Marine Biology. Advances in Marine Biology. 32: 325–387. ISBN 9780120261321. doi:10.1016/S0065-2881(08)60019-X. 
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