NATURAL-ENVIRONMENT AND LANDFORM DYNAMICS OF THE TATRA MOUNTAINS

The Tatra Mountains, located on the frontier between Poland and Czechoslovakia, constitute the highest mountain massif within the Carpathian Range of Central Europe. The highest summit reaches 2,663 m and the massif can be classified as a high-mountain (hochgebirge) landscape. The Tatra Mountains extended above the Pleistocene snowline and today there are alpine meadows and cryonival belts above timberline. Present-day landform dynamics are controlled by altitudinal differences in climatic and vegetational conditions. The area most strongly modeled by contemporary geomorphic processes lies between the upper timberline (at about 1,500 m) and 1,950 m, that is, within the alpine meadow belt and the dwarf pine belt. Within these belts debris flows, rockfalls, and slow mass movements are predominant. Slope morphodynamic systems above the timberline and fluvial systems on valley floors in the forest belts function independently because there is no direct linkage under normal climate and hydrological conditions. Sediment transfer is limited to individual geoecological belts and the results of weathering and denudation processes generally do not extend beyond a single morphodynamic system. Only during extreme, catastrophic events do both systems merge and then only for short periods. In this paper rates of the main geomorphic processes are estimated for each altitudinal belt and some examples of landform transformation are presented.