Exam 15: Preliminaries to Erosion: Weathering and Mass Wasting

Any downward movement of broken rocks owing to gravity is called mass wasting.

Suppose you were to study the landscape around your classroom. How would you be able to distinguish which forms of chemical weathering had helped to break down the rocks at your location?

Carbonic acid is closely connected with carbonation.

The single most important weathering agent is

The process of solifluction works ________.

The peeling of thin layers of stone off a large rock is ________.

An earthflow is most conspicuous in ________ where a bulging lobe of material pushes out onto a valley floor.

In percolating rainwater, dissolved gases and the decay products of local vegetation increase the water's capacity to ________.

Jointing is most regularly patterned in ________.

The most common oxidation effect in the lithosphere is ________.

Which of the following processes is most closely associated with "rusting"?

In ________ there is a rough sorting of particles, with larger pieces farther downslope.

A large joint extending long horizontal distances and through considerable thickness of rock is a ________ joint.

Gravity is the main force impelling movement in all of the following except ________.

It is ________ and ________ acting in conjunction with erosion that created the spectacular canyon of the Colorado River.

Like faults, a ________ is a separation in a rock body.

Mechanical weathering is more effective than chemical weathering in the breakdown of the individual grains of a large rock.

Weathering may reach as far as ________ below Earth's surface.

Granular disintegration is most closely associated with ________.

________ is (are) the most obvious result of weathering.