The Physical Geography of South America

This book, The Physical Geography of South America, is a contribution to the Oxford Regional Environments series being published by Oxford University Press. It presents a detailed and current statement of knowledge written by specialists in the many research fields of physical geography and related fields. With this book we aspire to fill a void in recent scientific literature, namely, the lack of high-quality interpretative and correlative work that seeks to integrate knowledge of South America across the environmental spectrum.

South America is an unusually fascinating continent. Although now tenuously linked physically with other lands to the north, and increasingly enmeshed in human globalization, its character owes much to prolonged isolation from neighboring continents, diluted only quite recently by infusions of plants, animals, and peoples from elsewhere. The continent thus reflects a strong element of endemism- of plants and animals that developed more or less in isolation over long intervals of geologic time, and later of peoples, particularly in the High Andes, who had achieved much long before they were impacted by colonists from beyond the seas. It is also a continent of dramatic gradients and elevational patterns. For example, vertical relief of over 13,000 m, in a distance of little more than 200 km, separates peaks in the High Andes from the depths of the Perú-Chile Trench offshore, while on land alone the highest Andes descend equally abruptly from alpine tundra into rain forest just above sea level in the Amazon lowlands.

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