Formas e depósitos glaciares e periglaciares no Xeoparque Montañas do Courel (Galicia)

Zusammenfassung

The Courel Mountains are located in Galicia, Northwest Iberian Peninsula (between 42.715° N; 42.32° N and 7.023° W; 7.42° W). Their relief is characterized by a group of embedded valleys and cramped watersheds that expand in a North-South direction. The sector is lithologically dominated by slabs, quartzites and limestones with small outcrops of diabase. The materials are intensively fractured by tectonic dynamics set up after the Cenozoic, with strike slip faults showing a prevailing NNE-SSW direction. Also, other fracture systems appear in this sector with directions NW-SE and W-E that fragmented the terrain and delimited a great cluster of blocks with sigmoidal shapes defining large sectors. The fluvial network is very much conditioned by this system of discontinuities that direct the general course of the valleys, but also, and in a singular way, by litho-logy. During the recent Pleistocene, possibly between ca. 40.000 and 11.000 years, the dominant climate was cold with alternating phases of different temperature and moisture conditions. This caused the remodelling of large sectors by glacial and periglacial processes. Glacial activity favoured the development of erosive lan-dforms, such as glacial cirques and glacial threshold, and accumulative features such as the moraine systems. Periglacial processes favoured the deposition of thick debris mantles covering the slopes.