Abstract:
Tafoni research has tended to focus on issues around definition and differences rather
than trying to develop general concepts for understanding the nature of tafoni. This
paper uses the concepts of fitness landscapes and morphospaces to develop a
standardized and dimensionless phase space within which to represent, visualize and
analyze a dataset of 800 tafoni collected from Antarctica. Within this phase space it is
possible to identify clustering of tafoni forms and to illustrate how tafoni development
is constrained by a relational hierarchy of rock structure, processes and geometry or
form.
