Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Mass wasting, also known as mass movement, [1] is a general term for the movement of rock or soil down slopes under the force of gravity. It differs from other processes of erosion in that the debris transported by mass wasting is not entrained in a moving medium, such as water, wind, or ice.
Gully – Landform created by running water and/or mass movement eroding sharply into soil; Hill – Landform that extends above the surrounding terrain; Hillock, also known as Knoll – Small hill; Mesa – Elevated area of land with a flat top and sides, usually much wider than buttes; Mountain pass – Route through a mountain range or over ...
The Vasquez Rock formations, located in the Sierra Pelona Mountains, were formed by tectonic activity along an offshoot of the San Andreas Fault.. Morphotectonics (from Ancient Greek: μορφή, morphḗ, "form"; [1] and τεκτονικός, tektonikos, "pertaining to building" [2]), or tectonic geomorphology, is a branch of geomorphology that studies how landforms are formed or affected by ...
The two colorful ridges (at bottom left and top right) used to form a single continuous line, but have been split apart by movement along the fault. In geology , a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock across which there has been significant displacement as a result of rock-mass movements.
Lateral density variations in the mantle result in convection currents, the slow creeping motion of Earth's solid mantle. At a seafloor spreading ridge, plates move away from the ridge, which is a topographic high, and the newly formed crust cools as it moves away, increasing its density and contributing to the motion.
Its speed can range from being barely noticeable to rapid movement. The velocity of the flow is dictated by water content: the higher the water content is, the higher the velocity will be. [ 1 ] Because of the dependency on water content for the velocity of the flow, it can take minutes or years for the materials to move down the slope.
In traditional usage, the term landslide has at one time or another been used to cover almost all forms of mass movement of rocks and regolith at the Earth's surface. In 1978, geologist David Varnes noted this imprecise usage and proposed a new, much tighter scheme for the classification of mass movements and subsidence processes. [26]
Extensional tectonics is associated with the stretching and thinning of the crust or the lithosphere.This type of tectonics is found at divergent plate boundaries, in continental rifts, during and after a period of continental collision caused by the lateral spreading of the thickened crust formed, at releasing bends in strike-slip faults, in back-arc basins, and on the continental end of ...