Abstract:

At the 7th International Geomorphology Congress in 2009, IAG Danxia geomorphology working group was proposed by the president of the Congress and approved by the International Association of Geomorphologists. In 2010, the 34th World Heritage Conference “China Danxia” successfully applied for the world heritage. These two events marked that China’s native Danxia landform went to the world and stepped on the international academic stage. However, the original definition of Danxia landform is lack of professional and normative scientific expression, which leads to improper cognitive misunderstanding, and leads to many disputes in the later study of Danxia landform and the inability of global comparison and exchange. Based on analyzing the professional defects of the definition of Danxia landform and the expression terms easy to be misunderstood, removing the false from the original definition by using the scientific abstract method and cognitive roadmap, extracting the essential characteristics and rules of Danxia landform by the procedure of “separation purification brevity”, we put forward a scientific definition of Danxia landform that is suitable for global comparison: water erosion is the main factor, while water erosion is the main factor under the combined action of external forces such as collapse, weathering and dissolution, the red bed landform is characterized by the combination of steep slopes.

Key words: Danxia landform, definition, cognitive misunderstanding, scientific abstraction, roadmap