Jovan Cvijic--‘the father of karst geomorphology’

Jovan Cvijic (1865 - 1927) was born in 1865 in the village of Loznica in western Serbia, which is surrounded by karst features. He attended the Academy in Beograd and then undertook advanced studies in Vienna, where he obtained his doctorate in Geography. His supervisor was Professor Albrecht Penck, the leading European geomorphologist of the era. Penck is celebrated for his contributions to alpine glacial geomorphology and chronology but had much wider interests. He was familiar with the northern Dinaric regions and encouraged Cvijic to focus on karst phenomena there. Cvijic was also fortunate to study with one of the foremost tectonic geologists of the time, Eduard Suess, because effects of tectonic deformation are very important everywhere in the Dinaric karst. During his years of graduate studies Cvijic was able to visit and investigate many areas within the Karst itself, plus the alpine karstlands of Austria and karst in the Punkva River basin of Moravia.

Jovan Cvijic published his most influential and celebrated work, Das Karstpha¨nomen, under Penck’s aegis in 1893, when he was only 28 years old. He then returned to Beograd to become a university teacher and researcher.  A slightly amended version of Das Karstphanomen was published in Serbo-Croat in 1895. He was a characteristic academic geographer of his period, studying, teaching and sometimes publishing in a variety of different topical areas, including anthropology and ethnography, as well as careful regional geographic accounts of parts of the  Dinaric karst (e.g., Cvijic' 1901). He was much influenced by a field tour that Penck took with his students and the eminent American geomorphologist, W.M. Davis, in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1899. Davis was the author of cyclic landform concepts that dominated the thinking of fluvial geomorphologists and many others in the English-speaking world and beyond throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Inescapably, Cvijic was motivated to look for cyclic behaviour in karst landform evolution. He spent World War I teaching in France, where he was able to visit karsts of the Cevennes, French and Swiss Alps. In 1918 he published his views on karst hydrology, attempting to place them in a cyclic framework. Returned to Beograd, he published a substantial paper on karren (Cvijic 1924) and was working on the most comprehensive review of all of his thinking when he died at the sadly early age of 62 years in 1927.

In the English-speaking world, Cvijic thus is best known and appreciated for his major publications of 1893, 1918 (summarized in English by Sanders 1921), and the incomplete review which was published posthumously in 1960. Das Karstphanomen (the core of his doctoral thesis) is not a well-balanced work; 52 of its 112 pages are devoted to description and classification for dolines, 23 pages consider poljes, and there are ten pages each for karst valleys, karst of the Adriatic coast, and a typology of karst landform assemblages. Its sequence of presentation, beginning with karren, (the smallest landforms), proceeding through the intermediate scale dolines and concluding with large scale valleys, poljes and regional assemblages, has been copied in perhaps the majority of later textbooks. He is well read, referencing many works by foreign authors (e.g., Sir Charles Lyell on the chalk of Norfolk, England), and his style is always enjoyable because he sprinkles detailed descriptions of local landscapes and features throughout the exposition of his ideas. Marjorie Sweeting wrote that ‘‘A study of Cvijic’s work is essential for any student of karst morphology’’ and considered Das Karstphanomen to be ‘‘...the beginning of karst studies proper’’ (Sweeting 1972).

In the 1918 paper Cvijic demonstrated that he had a much better conception of the nature and variability of meteoric water caves than did most other geologists and geomorphologists (karst or other) of that time. He understood that, in many instances, there was no water table established at depth in the rock when karstification began, and that (in alpine settings at least) the water levels in well developed caves were prone to fluctuate over considerable height ranges in response to spring thaw flooding, creating a distinctive hydrologic zone which is now termed ‘‘epiphreatic’’ (Ford 1987; Ford and Williams 1989). Cvijic then integrated these observations into a clever karst cyclic model that is considered below. This author first learned of the 1960 posthumous publication of his final work, La Ge´ographie des Terrains Calcaires, when attending an international geographical congress in London in 1964, having completed his own PhD thesis the year before. There was no karst textbook or substantive lesser review available in English at that time. Cvijic ’s volume (Cvijic 1960), had it been known to the author, would have been of great assistance because of his systematic organization and consolidation of thinking on karst hydrology. It is a masterwork 200 pages in length. It is incomplete; his editor and friend, the eminent French geomorpologist, Emmanuel de Martonne, wisely did not attempt to finish the chapters on caves and karst valleys from the notes he left behind. It is also somewhat flawed. At the close of it, Cvijic was attempting to illustrate (and reinforce) the division of karst landscapes into the ‘holokarst’ and ‘merokarst’ (mixed with fluvial) types that he had first set out in 1893, when they were based only upon his experience in the Dinaric regions and in Moravia. He now found it necessary to add a third class, terrains that are ‘‘transitional’’ between holokarst and merokarst conditions. As succinct accounts of these new terrains succeed one another (the Grandes Causses, the Lesser Causses, the French Fore-Alps, the Peloponnese, Cuba) it becomes apparent that the number of ‘‘transitional’’ examples may substantially exceed the holo- and mero-karst end members, suggesting that re-classification is needed here. Today, ‘merokarst’ has been replaced by the notions of ‘‘fluviokarst’’, and of autogenic versus allogenic dominant water sources (e.g., Ford and Williams 1989). The long association between karst scholars of the Dinaric region and France continues; Jean Nicod, doyen of the French school today, has recently published an extensive evaluation that has many features in the style of Cvijic (Nicod 2003).

Jovan Cvijic was a geographer and geologist of his time. His writings are elegant and clear, but only sparsely illustrated by pictures or diagrams. Although he is dealing with the dissolution of rocks by flowing water, there are no chemical formulae or physical equations. No figures attempt to plot values for dependent variables against independent variables, etc. Nevertheless, his contributions to karst science have been fundamental. Some of the most important ones are considered here.

 Jovan Cvijic and ‘‘karst’’

It is understood that the word ‘‘karst’’ is a Germanicization of the Slavic ‘‘krsˇ’’ or ‘‘kras’’. It means ‘‘stony ground’’ and was applied to regions of the Dinaric Karst (especially the northern or ‘‘classical’’ karst) marked by karrenfeld and doline terrains largely devoid of trees or soil as consequences of deforestation and overgrazing. Gams (2003), Kranjc (1994) and many others have written about the linguistic derivation in detail. Before Cvijic many travelers and some early geologists had used the Kras or Karst place name in association with descriptions of these distinctive landscapes and landforms. Authorities in many languages (Davis 1901; Danesˇ 1908; Katzer 1909; Sawicki 1909; Herak 1972, etc.), however, adopted ‘‘karst’’ to describe rock dissolutional processes and the landforms and groundwater systems derived from them because Cvijic ’s ‘‘Das Karst phanomen’’ had established (beyond any doubt) that they are distinct from the standard phenomena of fluvial geomorphology. Thus, historically, the 1893 publication is seen to have been the founding codification of the subject (Roglic 1972; Sweeting 1972).

Jovan Cvijic is ‘‘the father of karst geomorphology and hydrology’’. He was not without competition. His near contemporary, the French cave scientist, Edouard Martel, (‘‘the father of speleology’’) sought to establish the regional place name ‘‘Le Causse’’ in its stead (Gauchon 1999). ‘‘Karst’’ won out because it had historical priority and the greater weight of Cvijic publication to support it. ‘‘Karst’’ is a confusing term for many scholars and others, however. They can readily understand what the subject matter of ‘‘fluvial’’ or ‘‘glacial’’ (even ‘‘periglacial’’) geomorphology must be—but ‘‘karst?’’ If a new term were established today, it might avoid such regional ascriptions and, with all the poetry of scientists, propose ‘‘dissolutional geomorphology’’ or some similar term. But ‘‘karst’’ is now firmly entrenched throughout the literature in science and engineering worldwide and in many languages. Figure 1 compares its geographical source in the Dinaric region to its potential extent (the global outcrop of carbonate rocks) today.

The worldwide acceptance of ‘‘karst’’ has led, as well, to its much greater conceptual extension in geosciences and civil engineering than Cvijic would have imagined. Figure 2 is a cartoon that this author has used for the past 25 years to teach some of its many parts (Ford 1998). The subject matter of karst is no longer limited to the surface landforms and shallow circulation of meteoric water through caves that Cvijic studied. Juvenile waters, sea water, connate waters and gases, are all seen to contribute. Sedimentologists will focus on the ‘‘net deposition’’ zone in the cartoon, considering it to be the most important part, paying close attention to karst weathering horizons and hardgrounds developing in it. Economic geologists, instead, will look deep into the fluid expulsion and mixing zones for economic emplacements of ores. The study of buried and inert ‘‘paleokarst’’ has become a very big subject in its own right; every oil geologist must be aware of it because ～ 50% of the world’s oil and gas reserves are believed to be in limestones and dolomites, much of it trapped in karstic porosity.

Abstract from：Jovan Cvijic and the founding of karst geomorphology. Derek Ford, Environ Geol (2007) 51: 675–684.