> I'm surprised that I can't find an established tag or wiki page for a plateau, mesa, or tableland; an area of raised land that is flat on top: ... Is natural=plateau the best option? This sounds fine to me, as an American English speaker, but I'd like to know if it's the best British English option.
I don't think it's a question of ' British English'. In the early days of geology as a science, many of the founding naturalists did assign geomorphic feature names, of course first to those dominating their region. If your context is to have some sort of globally consistent lexicon, the three terms are distinct from one another, with some overlap between butte and mesa. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F3-540-31060-6_240 and https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/3-540-31060-6_289 ( from 'Geomorphology', 1968 ). The local context is different, especially for names. i.e. the 'Turtle Mountains' in North Dakota would barely be 'knolls' elsewhere in Alaska.: See https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/86417/kettle-lakes-of-the-turtle-mountains : " In most American states, the Turtle Mountains—which rise 600 to 800 feet (180 to 240 meters) above the surrounding plain—would be called hills. But in North Dakota, one of the flattest <http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2014.12001.x> states, people have a habit of calling even relatively modest rises mountains. (In the past, the U.S. Board of Geographic Names argued that mountains should have at least 1,000 feet (300 meters) of local relief to earn the designation, but the group abandoned the argument for linguistic consistency in the 1970s.)" Sometime the local label (name ) is strongly contradictory, the exact opposite of the local landform - especially in the American Southwest as homesick miners had a certain dark humour when they names places. Since the petro-geologists have, by now, did at least a first pass on most of the Earth's surface, it is fairly easy to use Google Scholar to discover the actual geomorphic classification terms used for classifying land forms in a particular area. There are also geologic maps sometimes available: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/geologic-map-of-the-mount-spokane-quadrangle-spokane-county-washington-and-kootenai-and-bonner- Michael Patrick Data Ferret <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail&utm_term=icon> Virus-free. www.avast.com <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail&utm_term=link> <#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
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