Topography
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This article is about Topography as the study of landforms at any scale. For other uses, see
Topography (disambiguation).
For discussion of land surfaces themselves, see
Terrain.
A topographic map with
contour intervals
Topography (
Greek topos, "place", and
graphia, "writing") is the study of
Earth's
surface features or those of
planets,
moons, and
asteroids.
In a broader sense, topography is concerned with local detail in general, including not only relief but also
vegetative and human-made features, and even
local history and
culture. This meaning is less common in America, where topographic maps with
elevation contours have made "topography" synonymous with relief. The older sense of
Topography as the study of place still has currency in Europe.
For the purposes of this article, topography specifically involves the recording of relief or
terrain, the three-dimensional quality of the surface, and the identification of specific
landforms. This is also known as
geomorphometry. In modern usage, this involves generation of elevation data in electronic form. It is often considered to include the graphic representation of the landform on a
map by a
variety of techniques, including
contour lines,
Hypsometric tints, and
relief shading.
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