weathering and sedimentary rocks.pptVIP

Lecture 9: Surface Processes: chemical and physical weathering and sedimentary rocks Questions What is the rock cycle? How do rocks get destroyed and recycled at the surface of the Earth? At the other end of the transport system, how do weathered and eroded materials end up making the various kinds of sedimentary rocks? What can observations of the sedimentary record reveal about the tectonics, petrology, and climate of both depositional environments and upstream source environments? Weathering and Sedimentation in the Rock Cycle Our geology so far has focused on internally-driven processes: plate tectonics, magmatism, metamorphism, orogeny. Weathering and Sedimentation in the Rock Cycle A more detailed view of the surface-driven parts of the rock cycle shows the various steps between source rock and sedimentary product Weathering: decomposition of rocks There is a distinction between weathering and erosion: Weathering converts exposed rock to soil in place Erosion transports dissolved or fragmented material from the source area where weathering is occurring to a depositional environment where it can form sediment. Most of the earth’s surface is covered by exposure of sediment or sedimentary rock, by area. But the sediment layer is thin in most places, with respect to overall crustal thickness, so sedimentary rock is a minor volume fraction of the crust (in part by definition: once buried to the mid-crust, sediments get cooked to metasediments). Weathering: chemical and physical The destruction of rocks at the Earth’s surface by weathering has two fundamental modes of operation: Chemical weathering is dissolution or alteration of the original minerals, usually by reactions with aqueous solutions that come into contact with the rock. Chemical weathering puts ions from the source minerals into solution for subsequent erosion by transport in flowing water as dissolved load. Physical weathering is fragmentation into progressively smaller particles, from intact outcrop