Soil degradation, including rocky desertification, of the karst regions in China is severe. Karst landscapes are especially sensitive to soil degradation as carbonate rocks are nutrient-poor and easily eroded. Understanding the balance between soil formation and soil erosion is critical for long-term soil sustainability, yet little is known about the initial soil forming processes on karst terr...

The critical load (CL) of acidic atmospheric deposition represents the load of acidity deposited from the atmosphere to the earth's surface at which harmful acidification effects on sensitive biological receptors are thought to occur. In this study, the CL for forest soils was estimated for 27 watersheds throughout the United States using a steady-state mass balance approach based on both natio...

Terrain morphology has been on the radar of Computer Graphics for more than twenty years and various techniques for its modeling have been presented. These approaches range from fractal and multifractal surface generation to physically-based models of erosion and weathering. From all the weathering phenomena that can be observed in Nature, the hydraulic erosion has the major visual importance. ...

Rock varnish, erosional grooves, and well-developed cavernous weathering phenomena occur in close association on a small biotite-monzogranite nunatak in the Northern Foothills region, Northern Victoria Land, Antarctica. The grooves, similar in appearance to the ‘rinnenkarren’ described in the karst literature, are developed on steeply inclined (>35°) bedrock surfaces while the rock varnish occu...

Research Professor of Ecology, Systems Ecology Research Group, San Diego State University, San Diego, California 92182 Abstract: The objective of this paper is to assess the role of mineralization processes (pyrolysis, decomposition, and weathering) on nutrient (N, P, K, Ca, Mg, and S) release in mediterranean-type ecosystems. Decomposition is the most important process for N release. Decomposi...

Lithological characteristics, mineral composition, physical properties of water and physical and mechanical properties, weathering zone distribution and other factors of bedrock weathering zone in coal-seam roof determine the strength of its watertight performance, while its performance has a direct impact on impermeable overlying loose surface water aquifers as well as the possible collapse in...

Spacecraft exploring Mars such as the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, as well as the Mars Science Laboratory or Curiosity rover, have accumulated evidence for wet and habitable conditions on early Mars more than 3 billion years ago. Current conditions, by contrast, are cold, extremely arid and seemingly inhospitable. To evaluate exactly how dry today's environment is, it is impo...

The end of the Palaeozoic is marked by two mass-extinction events during the Middle Permian (Capitanian) and the Late Permian (Changhsingian). Given similarities between the two events in geochemical signatures, such as large magnitude negative dC anomalies, sedimentological signatures such as claystone breccias, and the approximate contemporaneous emplacement of large igneous provinces, many a...

The formation and stabilization of soil aggregates play a key role in soil functions. To date, few studies have been performed on the variation of soil aggregation with increasing soil weathering degree. Here, soil aggregation and its influencing factors along the weathering gradient were investigated. Six typical zonal soils (derived from similar parent materials) were sampled from temperate t...

The appearance manifold [WTL∗06] is an efficient approach for modeling and editing time-variant appearance of materials from the BRDF data captured at single time instance. However, this method is difficult to apply in images in which weathering and shading variations are combined. In this paper, we present a technique for modeling and editing the weathering effects of an object in a single ima...