Abstract
The “Pink Granite” coast, in northern Brittany, some 30 km long, is more familiar to tourists than to geomorphologists. The following paper highlights the limitations of the explanations propounded to the 700,000 visitors who annually come to admire the fantastic shapes into which the coarse-grained granites, which are reddish in fact, have been eroded. The occurrence of assemblages of boulder piles involves their subsurface initiation by differential weathering and the stripping of the saprolite by marine processes. Following their exhumation, basins and flutes have developed on the granite outcrops under subaerial conditions. At all scales of analysis, the “Pink Granite” coast exhibits an assemblage of landforms, which are not specific of coastal environments, illustrating the concept of convergence or equifinality, that is, the production of similar landforms by different processes.
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Acknowledgements
I thank the guest editors Professor Marie-Françoise André (University Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand 2) and Professor Monique Fort (University Denis Diderot, Paris 7) for their invitation to prepare this paper. I am especially grateful to my sister Maryvonne Le Rouzic who improved the form of the original manuscript, to Laurence David who revised the Figs. 6.2 and 6.3 and to an anonymous referee who provided helpful reviews, and I am deeply indebted to Professor Dominique Sellier (University of Nantes) for a stimulating dialogue over the years.
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Lageat, Y. (2014). The “Pink Granite” Coast (Northern Brittany). In: Fort, M., André, MF. (eds) Landscapes and Landforms of France. World Geomorphological Landscapes. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7022-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7022-5_6
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