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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.
Freeze–thaw weathering is caused by moisture freezing inside cracks in rock. Upon freezing its volume expands, causing large forces which cracks spall off the outer surface. As this cycle repeats the outer surface repeatedly undergoes spalling, resulting in weathering.
Physical weathering, also called mechanical weathering or disaggregation, is the class of processes that causes the disintegration of rocks without chemical change. Physical weathering involves the breakdown of rocks into smaller fragments through processes such as expansion and contraction, mainly due to temperature changes.
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.
As a glacier moves down a valley, friction causes the basal ice of the glacier to melt and infiltrate joints (cracks) in the bedrock. The freezing and thawing action of the ice enlarges, widens, or causes further cracks in the bedrock as it changes volume across the ice/water phase transition (a form of hydraulic wedging), gradually loosening ...
In the winter, melting snow, in the form of water, seeps into the cracks and then freezes at night. When water freezes, it expands by almost 10%, prying open the cracks bit by bit, making them even wider, similar to the way a pothole forms in a paved road. In addition to frost wedging, rain is another weathering process causing erosion.
BOSTON – Traffic through one of Massachusetts’ many tunnels was halted on Friday after a large chunk of concrete fell without warning, damaging several vehicles. Video from a traffic camera ...
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.