Aim Pleistocene erratic boulders are rocks that were relocated by glaciers during the Ice Ages. When their geology differs from of landscape surrounds them, form habitat islands for regionally rare, edaphically specialised, rock-dwelling cryptogams (bryophytes, ferns and lichens). Such constitute terrestrial model systems exploring island biogeographic predictions effect environmental variables...

Rock boulders are typical features of the surfaces of many airless bodies, so the possibility of estimating their potential survival times may provide insights into the rates of surface-modification processes. As an opening point of this study we employ estimates of the survival times of meter-sized boulders on the surface of the Moon based on analysis of the spatial density of boulders on the ...

In northern Fennoscandia, semi-alluvial boulder-bed channels with coarse glacial legacy sediment are abundant, and due to widespread anthropogenic manipulation during timber-floating, unimpacted reference reaches rare. The landscape context of these rapids—with numerous mainstem lakes that buffer high flows connectivity in addition a regional low yield—contribute amounts fine incompetent transp...

The area surrounding Lomonosov crater on Mars has a high density of seemingly organised boulder patterns. These form seemingly sorted polygons and stripes within kilometre scale blockfields, patches of boulder strewn ground which are common across the Martian high latitudes. Several hypotheses have been suggested to explain the formation of clastic patterned ground on Mars. It has been proposed...

Chlorine-36 is produced in rocks exposed to cosmic rays at the earth surface through thermal neutron activation of 35C1, spallation of 39K and 't°Ca, and slow negative muon capture by 4°Ca. We have measured the 36C1 content of 14C-dated glacial boulders from the White Mountains in eastern California and in a 14C-dated basalt flow from Utah. Effective, time-integrated production parameters were ...

Aims. We investigate the possibility that the observed sea-otter shape of the asteroid Itokawa, associated with the presence of big boulders on its surface, originates from the reaccumulation process that may have formed this asteroid, assuming that it consists of reaccumulated fragments from a catastrophically disrupted parent body. Methods. We computed the gravitational phase of an asteroid d...

Debris flows induce seismic ground unrest detectable over large distances. However, recent theoretical description of debris-flow seismograms has yet to be implemented in alarm systems. Here, we test the implications a particle impact model for detection and warning using data. We analyze 14 debris at Illgraben, Switzerland, instantaneous weight measurements, network video footage. A novel appr...