Glyptogenesis

a term introduced at the beginning of the 20th century by the French geologist E. Haug to designate the sum total of transformations of the surface of dry land by exogenous processes. Glyptogenesis is primarily the process of the breakdown of rocks, the removal of the products of disintegration from the dry land, and the restructuring of the relief of land. E. Haug extended the term glyptogenesis to include the formation of continental deposits. In his view, glyptogenesis is one of the three phases of a geological cycle that begins with rock formation (lithogenesis), followed by mountain formation (orogeny), which in its turn brings about a sharp intensification of glyptogenesis. E. Haug simplified to an extreme extent the geological history of the earth’s crust and schematized it, regarding it as a repetition of a series of similar three-phase alternating cycles.