Palaeohydrology

Palaeohydrology originated with and continues to have a strong focus on palaeofluvial processes, especially palaeoflooding, and this is reflected in eight sections:
- Channel Patterns and Regime commences with Davis’s 1913 paper on underfit rivers, classics by Dury (1954, 1965) and Schumm (1968), and an important Polish contribution, Korzarski and Rotnicki (1977).
- River Floodplains and Terraces illustrates how mapping and quantitative description became the basis for palaeo¬hydrological interpretation of the landscape.
- Alluvial Chronology considers how the development of dating aided studies that identified major changes driven by climate.
- Sediment Transport shows how engineering/geomorphologic understanding of sediment processes was initially used to back-calculate the flows associated with fluvial events.
- Megafloods are high-discharge (>106 m³/s) flood flows now known to have been especially important at the end of the Pleistocene, but in 1923, Bretz’s hypothesis of such “cataclysmic flows” was controversial.
- Palaeoflood Hydrology brings together the papers that mark the development from geological investigation of flood-scarred landscapes to a broader, global science rooted in environmental change studies.
- Palaeobotanical evidence to aid palaeohydrological work originated in the 1960s, and Sigafoos (1964) is a significant contribution.
- Palaeolakes were found to afford information central to understanding past climate in the 1960s and three seminal papers are included.

An excellent resource for graduate and post-graduate level courses in hydrology and hydro-geomorphology, reproducing many important papers that are otherwise difficult to access.