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Furthermore, chemical and physical weathering often go hand in hand. For example, cracks extended by physical weathering will increase the surface area exposed to chemical action, thus amplifying the rate of disintegration. [6] Frost weathering is the most important form of physical weathering. Next in importance is wedging by plant roots ...
Abrasion is a process of weathering that occurs when material being transported wears away at a surface over time, commonly occurring with ice and glaciers. The primary process of abrasion is physical weathering. Its the process of friction caused by scuffing, scratching, wearing down, marring, and rubbing away of materials.
Frost weathering is a collective term for several mechanical weathering processes induced by stresses created by the freezing of water into ice. The term serves as an umbrella term for a variety of processes, such as frost shattering, frost wedging, and cryofracturing.
Many explanations have been proposed for honeycomb and other cavernous weathering. These explanations include marine abrasion; wind corrosion; mechanical weathering resulting from short-term temperature variations; chemical weathering of the interior of the rock (core-softening) under a protective crust (case-hardening) followed by mechanical removal of the softened material; biogeochemical ...
Hydraulic action, most generally, is the ability of moving water (flowing or waves) to dislodge and transport rock particles.This includes a number of specific erosional processes, including abrasion, at facilitated erosion, such as static erosion where water leaches salts and floats off organic material from unconsolidated sediments, and from chemical erosion more often called chemical ...
Spheroidal weathering has often been incorrectly attributed solely to various types of physical weathering. [1] [2] [5] Frequently, erosion has removed the layers of altered rock and other saprolite surrounding corestones that were produced by spheroidal weathering. This leaves many corestones as freestanding boulders on the ground's surface.
Exfoliating slabs of granite, on Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, USA. Exfoliating granite is a granite undergoing exfoliation, or onion skin weathering (desquamation).The external delaminated layers of granite are gradually produced by the cyclic variations of temperature at the surface of the rock in a process also called spalling.
A discontinuity can be, for example, a bedding, schistosity, foliation, joint, cleavage, fracture, fissure, crack, or fault plane. A division is made between mechanical and integral discontinuities. Discontinuities may occur multiple times with broadly the same mechanical characteristics in a discontinuity set, or may be a single discontinuity.