Walther Penck

Walther Penck (born Aug. 30, 1888, Vienna—died Sept. 29, 1923, Stuttgart, Ger.) was a German geomorphologist noted for his theories of landform evolution. He was the son of the geographer Albrecht Penck. His ideas of the dependence of landform evolution upon the mobility of the Earth’s crust were a direct challenge to the accepted ideas of geomorphology of his time. His concept of parallel slope retreat stimulated the reexamination of some basic assumptions of the erosion cycle concept.

Penck was a geologist for the Dirección General de Minas in Buenos Aires from 1912 until 1915, when he became a professor of mineralogy and geology at the University of Constantinople. In 1918 he became a professor at the University of Leipzig.

Penck’s major work on landform evolution was Die morphologischen Analyse (1924; Morphological Analysis of Land Forms, 1953).