A cirque stairway or sequence of cirque steps is a stepped succession of glacially eroded rock basins.
[Whittow, John (1984). ''Dictionary of Physical Geography''. London: Penguin, 1984, p. 95. .] Their individual formation is that of a
cirque
A (; from the Latin word ) is an amphitheatre-like valley formed by Glacier#Erosion, glacial erosion. Alternative names for this landform are corrie (from , meaning a pot or cauldron) and ; ). A cirque may also be a similarly shaped landform a ...
.
These steps are arranged one above and behind the other at different heights in the terrain and caused by the same morphodynamic processes, albeit resulting in different landform shapes depending on the type of rock and the depositional circumstances involved. The lower step often lacks the steep headwalls typical of cirques.
[Leser, Hartmut, ed. (2005). ''Wörterbuch Allgemeine Geographie'', 13th ed., dtv, Munich, p. 915 (''Stufenkar''). .]
A well-known example is the
Zastler Loch below the summit of the
Feldberg, the highest mountain of the
Black Forest
The Black Forest ( ) is a large forested mountain range in the States of Germany, state of Baden-Württemberg in southwest Germany, bounded by the Rhine Valley to the west and south and close to the borders with France and Switzerland. It is th ...
in
Germany
Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...
.
References
Glacial landforms
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