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Approaches to Modeling Weathered Regolith

Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Department of Geological Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, U.S.A., brantley@essc.psu.edu

Art F. White

U. S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, California 94025, U.S.A.

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

	INTRODUCTION

 
Sustainable soils are a requirement for maintaining human civilizations (Carter and Dale 1974; Lal 1989). However, as the "most complicated biomaterial on the planet" (Young and Crawford 2004), soils represent one of the most difficult systems to understand and model with respect to chemical, physical, and biological coupling over time (Fig. 1).

View larger version (43K):   Figure 1. A schematic picture of the "weathering engine" at the Earth’s surface. This weathering engine is part of the Critical Zone that extends from the vegetation canopy down through the saturated zone. The regolith-bedrock interface lowers at the weathering advance rate, . The rate of removal of material at the surface is the erosion rate, E. Some regolith profiles grow with time in a transient mode while others may attain steady state where = E. As shown, many physical, chemical, and biological processes combine to control regolith in the Critical Zone. Climatic, anthropogenic, and tectonic forcings affect these processes; the sum total of weathering processes can then be read in changes in the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and pedosphere. [Used with permission of the American Geophysical Union from Anderson et al. 2004.]