Mass Wasting - Mass Wasting Processes, Moving Mountains To The Sea, Mass Wasting In Loose Aggregates, Mass Wasting In Rocks And Soils
gravity
Mass wasting, or mass movement, is the process that moves Earth materials down a slope, under the influence of gravity. Mass wasting processes range from violent landslides to imperceptibly slow creep. Mass wasting decreases the steepness of slopes, leaving them more stable. While ice formation or water infiltration in sediments or rocks may aid mass wasting, the driving force is gravity. All mass wasting is a product of one or more of the following mass wasting processes: flow, fall, slide, or slump.
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Consider a chunk of rock currently attached to a jagged outcrop high on a mountain. It will move to the sea as a result of three processes: weathering, mass wasting, and erosion. On warm days, water from melting snow trickles into a crack which has begun to form between this chunk and the rest of the mountain. Frigid nights make this water freeze again, and its expansion will widen and extend the …
The steepness of a natural slope depends on the size and shape of the material making up the slope and environmental factors, principally water content. Most people learn about this early in life, playing in a sandbox or on the beach. If you dump dry sand from a bucket it forms a conical hill. The more sand you dump the larger the hill gets, but the slope of the hill stays the same. If you stop du…
Most slopes in nature are on materials that are not loose collections of grains. They occur on bedrock or on soils which are bound together by organic material, etc. Yet many of the principles used to explain mass wasting in aggregates still apply. Instead of mass wasting taking place as an avalanche, however, it results from a portion of the slope breaking off and sliding down the hill. We usuall…
Rivers in the desert regions of the southwestern states form canyons with fairly steep walls, and the buttes and mesas in those regions also have very steep walls. The topography of the eastern states is much more subdued, dominated by rolling hills and gentle slopes. How does rainfall control this contrast in landscape? Weathering needs water for freezing and thawing, chemical reactions, and grow…
In a natural setting, mass wasting presents little threat. Most slopes are relatively stable most of the time. However, when people modify slopes—their gravitational loads, or their water content—they may become unstable and fail. Engineers can study the stresses acting on a slope, test the material of which it is made, make some assumptions about behavior with higher pore pressure, …
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