The Mantle of Rock Waste

We have seen that rocks are everywhere slowly wasting away. They are broken in pieces by frost, by tree roots, and by heat and cold. They dissolve and decompose under the chemical action of water and the various corrosive substances which it contains, leaving their insoluble residues as residual clays and sands upon the surface. As a result, there is everywhere forming a mantle of rock waste which covers the land. It is well to imagine how the country would appear were this mantle with its soil and vegetation all scraped away or had it never been formed. The surface of the land would then be everywhere of bare rock as unbroken as a quarry floor.

Henry Be

The thickness of the mantle. In any locality, the thickness of the mantle of rock waste depends as much on the rate at which it is constantly being removed as on the rate at which it is forming. On the face of cliffs, it is absent, for here waste is removed as fast as it is made. Where waste is carried away more slowly than it is produced, it accumulates in time to great depth.

The granite of Pikes Peak is disintegrated to a depth of twenty feet. In the city of Washington, granite rock is so softened to a depth of eighty feet that it can be removed with pick and shovel. About Atlanta, Georgia, the rocks are completely rotted for one hundred feet from the surface, while the beginnings of decay may be noticed at thrice that depth. In places in southern Brazil, the rock is decomposed to a depth of four hundred feet.

In southwestern Wisconsin, a reddish residual clay has an average depth of thirteen feet on broad uplands, where it has been removed to the least extent. The country-rock on which it rests is limestone with about ten per cent of insoluble impurities. At least how thick, then, was that portion of the limestone which has rotted down to the clay?

Distinguishing characteristics of residual waste. We must learn to distinguish waste formed in place by the action of the weather from the products of other geological agencies. Residual waste is unstratified. It contains no substances which have not been derived from the weathering of the parent rock. There is a gradual transition from residual waste into the unweathered rock beneath. Waste resting on sound rock evidently has been shifted and was not formed in place.

In certain regions of southern Missouri, the land is covered with a layer of broken flints and red clay, while the country rock is limestone. The limestone contains nodules of flint, and we may infer that it has been by the decay and removal of thick masses of limestone that the residual layer of clay and flints has been left upon the surface. Flint is a form of quartz, dull-lustred, usually gray or blackish in color, and opaque except on thinnest edges, where it is translucent.

Over much of the northern states, there is spread an unstratified stony clay called the drift. It often rests on sound rocks. It contains grains of sand, pebbles, and bowlders composed of many different minerals and rocks that the country rock cannot furnish. Hence the drift cannot have been formed by the decay of the rock of the region. A shale or limestone, for example, cannot waste to a clay containing granite pebbles. The origin of the drift will be explained in subsequent chapters.

The differences in rocks are due more to their soluble than to their insoluble constituents. The latter are few in number and are much the same in rocks of widely different nature, being chiefly quartz, silicate of alumina, and iron oxide. By the removal of their soluble parts very many and widely different rocks rot down to a residual clay gritty with particles of quartz and coloured red or yellow with iron oxide.

In a broad way, the changes which rocks undergo in weathering are an adaptation to the environment in which they find themselves at the earth’s surface,—an environment different from that in which they were formed under sea or underground. In open-air, where they are attacked by various destructive agents, few of the rock- making minerals are stable compounds except quartz, the iron oxides, and the silicate of alumina; and so it is to one or more of these comparatively insoluble substances that most rocks are reduced by long decay.

Which produces a mantle of finer waste, frost or chemical decay? which a thicker mantle? In what respects would you expect that the mantle of waste would differ in warm humid lands like India, in frozen countries like Alaska, and in deserts such as the Sahara?

Myoung Kang

The soil. The same agencies which produce the mantle of waste are continually at work upon it, breaking it up into finer and finer particles and causing its more complete decay. Thus on the surface, where the waste has weathered longest, it is gradually made fine enough to support the growth of plants and is then known as soil. The coarser waste beneath is sometimes spoken of as subsoil. Soil usually contains more or less dark, carbonaceous, decaying organic matter, called humus and is then often termed the humus layer. Soil forms not only on waste produced in place from the rock beneath but also on materials which have been transported, such as sheets of glacial drift and river deposits.

Until rocks are reduced to residual clays the work of the weather is more rapid and effective on the fragments of the mantle of waste than on the rocks from which waste is being formed. Why?

Any fresh excavation of cellar or cistern, or cut for road or railway, will show the characteristics of the humus layer. It may form only a grey film on the surface, or we may find it a layer a foot or more thick, dark, or even black, above, and growing gradually lighter in colour as it passes by insensible gradations into the subsoil. In some way, the decaying vegetable matter continually forming on the surface has become mingled with the material beneath it.

How humus and the subsoil are mingled. The mingling of humus and the subsoil is brought about by several means. The roots of plants penetrate the waste, and when they die leave their decaying substance to fertilize it. Leaves and stems falling on the surface are turned under by several agents. Earthworms and other animals whose home is in the waste drag them into their burrows either for food or to line their nests. Trees overthrown by the wind, roots and all, turn over the soil and subsoil and mingle them together. Bacteria also work in the waste and contribute to its enrichment. The animals living in the mantle do much in other ways toward the making of soil. They bring the coarser fragments from beneath to the surface, where the waste weathers more rapidly. Their burrows allow air and water to penetrate the waste more freely and to affect it to greater depths.

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Ants. In the tropics the mantle of waste is worked over chiefly by ants. They excavate underground galleries and chambers, extending sometimes as much as fourteen feet below the surface, and build mounds which may reach as high above it. In some parts of Paraguay and southern Brazil these mounds, like gigantic potato hills, cover tracts of considerable area.

Maksim Shutov

In search for its food—the dead wood of trees—the so-called white ant constructs runways of earth about the size of gas pipes, reaching from the base of the tree to the topmost branches. On the plateaus of central Africa explorers have walked for miles through forests every tree of which was plastered with these galleries of mud. Each grain of earth used in their construction is moistened and cemented by slime as it is laid in place by the ant, and is thus acted on by organic chemical agents. Sooner or later these galleries are beaten down by heavy rains, and their fertilizing substances are scattered widely by the winds.

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Earthworms. In temperate regions, the waste is worked over largely by earthworms. In making their burrows worms swallow earth in order to extract from it any nutritive organic matter which it may contain. They treat it with their digestive acids, grind it in their stony gizzards, and void it in castings on the surface of the ground. It was estimated by Darwin that in many parts of England each year, on every acre, more than ten tons of earth pass through the bodies of earthworms and are brought to the surface and that every few years the entire soil layer is thus worked over by them.

Karim Manjra

In all these ways the waste is made fine and stirred and enriched. Grain by grain the subsoil with its fresh mineral ingredients is brought to the surface, and the rich organic matter which plants and animals have taken from the atmosphere is plowed under. Thus Nature plows and harrows on “the great world’s farm” to make ready and ever to renew a soil fit for the endless succession of her crops.

The world processes by which rocks are continually wasting away are thus indispensable to the life of plants and animals. The organic world is built on the ruins of the inorganic, and because the solid rocks have been broken down into soil men are able to live upon the earth.

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Solar energy. The source of the energy which accomplishes all this necessary work is the sun. It is the radiant energy of the sun which causes the disintegration of rocks, which lifts vapor into the atmosphere to fall as rain, which gives life to plants and animals. Considering the earth in a broad way, we may view it as a globe of solid rock,—the lithosphere,—surrounded by two mobile envelopes: the envelope of air,—the atmosphere; and the envelope of water,—the hydrosphere. Under the action of solar energy, these envelopes are in constant motion. Water from the hydrosphere is continually rising in vapor into the atmosphere, the air of the atmosphere penetrates the hydrosphere,—for its gases are dissolved in all waters,—and both air and water enter and work upon the solid earth. By their action upon the lithosphere they have produced a third envelope,—the mantle of rock waste.

Federico Respini

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This envelope also is in movement, not indeed as a whole, but particle by particle. The causes which set its particles in motion, and the different forms which the mantle comes to assume, we will now proceed to study.

Source: The Elemets of Geology