Weathering

Weathering

Weathering: it's a process of the landspace modeled. Is the process of disintegration and transformation of the rock into the different elements that forms it.

Types:

• Physical: fracture of rocks into smaller fragments that conserve the characteristics of the original material. 

• Frost weathering: it consists in the rupture of rocks due to action of the ice. The water is deposited in the cracks of the rocks. When the temperature drops, the water freezes, so the volumen increases. When the volume increases, the rock fractures.

Pedriza

Cree

• Haloclasty: it consists in the rupture of rocks due to action of the salt. Water with dissolved salts penetrates into small cracks in rocks. When evaporation occurs, the salts are able to form crystals and they cause big tensions in the pores and cracks in the rock.

• Theroclasty: it consists in the rock fragmentation due to sudden temperature changes in small periods of time. The expansion and the contraction, caused by temperature changes, produce stress in rocks that, finally, breaks.

• Biological: trees that grow inside rocks and when the trunk widens, the rock breaks.

• Burrowing animals (like rabbits, moles...).

Prairie dog in its burrow

• Chemical: when the rocks fractured don't conserve the characteristics of the original materials.

• Dissolution: it is the action or process of dissolving or being dissolved.

Badlands: grooves formed in rocks or sand by dissolution

• Carbonation and decarbonation: it is the combination of the materials with carbon.

Stone Forest, Madagascar

• Hydration: combination of the materials with water.

• Oxidation: combination of the materials with oxygen.

 Pululahua (Ecuador)

 

• Lichens: symbiosis of fungus and algaes.

Tree with liquen

 

• Living organisms: they produce ammonia in the urine and CO2.