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This process is often termed frost spalling. In fact, this is often the most important weathering process for exposed rock in many areas. Similar processes can act on asphalt pavements, contributing to various forms of cracking and other distresses, which, when combined with traffic and the intrusion of water, accelerate rutting, the formation ...
This makes frost wedging, in which pore water freezes and its volumetric expansion fractures the enclosing rock, appear to be a plausible mechanism for frost weathering. Ice will simply expand out of a straight open fracture before it can generate significant pressure. Thus, frost wedging can only take place in small tortuous fractures. [5]
This process, known as frost wedging, puts stress on the rock structure as water expands when it freezes. Impacts from large clasts carried in the bedload can cause additional stress to the bedrock. [ 5 ]
Mass wasting is a general term for any process of erosion that is driven by gravity and in which the transported soil and rock is not entrained in a moving medium, such as water, wind, or ice. [2] The presence of water usually aids mass wasting, but the water is not abundant enough to be regarded as a transporting medium.
This manifests itself by a form of mass wasting called exfoliation. This form of weathering causes convex and relatively thin sheets of rock to slough off the exposed surfaces of batholiths (a process accelerated by frost wedging). The result is fairly clean and rounded rock faces. A well-known result of this process is Half Dome in Yosemite ...
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.
Solifluction is a collective name for gradual processes in which a mass moves down a slope ("mass wasting") related to freeze-thaw activity. This is the standard modern meaning of solifluction, which differs from the original meaning given to it by Johan Gunnar Andersson in 1906. [1] [2]
As this process continues over many years ice wedges can grow, up to the size of a swimming pool. [ citation needed ] Ice wedges usually appear in a polygonal pattern known as ice wedge polygons . The cracks can also be filled with materials other than ice, especially sand, and are then called sand wedges .