Earth Surface Processes, GEOL 4880 Humphrey, fall 2014, Homework #2

Here are 4 questions to work on.  The final question is the field trip we talked about in class, I will email directions for the field work on Saturday.  Leave yourself enough time to do the field work! 

Please be careful… the homework gets posted just before it is assigned.  Links to homework further on in the course lead to old homework.  I change some questions, and also change some of the data each year, so you will be doing the wrong homework (the due date has to be this years for the homework to be valid).  The last part of question 3 is hard.

Many of you are making simple mistakes, both algebraic and conceptual.  Here is a summary table of most of the equations used so far, please use it and compare with your notes.  

1 A soil with a porosity of 40% and a dry bulk density of 1600kg/cubic meter lies 2 meters deep over solid bedrock.  Assume the slope and the soil are horizontal and that ground water motion is zero.  After a heavy rain the soil is saturated to the surface. 

a) Calculate the water pressure at the soil/bedrock interface

b) Calculate the effective normal stress across the soil/bedrock interface

c) Calculate the shear stress on the bedrock interface.

d) What is the Hydraulic Gradient from the surface to the soil/bedrock interface (a fancy way of asking the Total Head difference from surface to bedrock)

 

2 Turbidity, or the opacity of water is often used as a rough estimate of the amount of sediment in rivers. If the sediment size is fairly constant with time this works well, with some initial calibration. However the turbidity depends heavily on grain size and if the grain size varies, estimates of sediment transport based on turbidity can have large errors.  Investigate this problem by looking at the turbidity created by two different crushed rock samples mixed into water.

a) Calculate the amount (volume) of crushed rock that is needs to be suspended in water to make a 1 meter cube of water 10% opaque, (in other words: so that 10% of the light hits a particle while traveling through the 1 meter cube of water).  Use two different grain sizes, fine silt, and coarse sand. (hint: it is x-section area of each grain that blocks light, but the mass is due to the volume.  Make the simplifying assumption that no rock particles hide behind each other.).

3 Is it possible to create mountains by erosion?  Hint, think of isostacy and think of dissecting a large region with deep valleys.

a To be precise, calculate the maximum peak elevation you might achieve, if the Red Desert of Wyoming (elevation about 2000m) was dissected by erosion, by a series of 2000m deep valleys, with 45 degree side walls.  Each valley is  4 km apart. (the resulting topography will look like a saw tooth in profile.  Only the ridge crests do not erode.  Assume complete isostacy and ignore any other factors.

b To see a possible example of this behavior, use GOOGLE EARTH to look at the Grand Canyon.  Notice the rim elevation is higher than land away from the canyon.  A particularly interesting example is the region of the Little Colorado River, a tributary of the main Colorado River, flowing north and west of Cameron Arizona (north of Flagstaff).  It flows in the opposite direction to the topography.  Could the elevation difference of the land from Cameron to the region of confluence with the main Colorado river be caused by downcutting of the Colorado river?

4 (part d is very difficult to do correctly, but everybody should try part a,b,c: HINT, it does not need any factor of safety or other complex calculation(!), clear thinking is required, but very little work)    At Vedauwoo, a sheet of exfoliating granite 1 meter in downslope length lies on an exposed granite slope, with slope less than the friction angle (let’s say a slope angle 20 degrees, friction angle 30 degrees). The granite slab is only a few centimeters thick and warms up and cools down with the diurnal (daily) cycle. The underlying granite is such a large thermal mass that it hardly heats or cools at all. Assume the granite slab goes through a steady 10 degree C peak to peak sinusoidal diurnal cycle. Also assume the slab is basically a rectangular block that is touching the underlying rock only at its upper and lower ends. Coefficient of thermal expansion of granite is 0.00001 per degree C (ie. dimensionally a strain per degree)

a)    How much does the block lengthen each day (and contract each night)?

b)      Calculate the rate of motion, in meters per year of the slab, resulting from the diurnal thermal cycle.  Although this example of thermal creep is extreme, in fact, most loose materials (soils, rock debris etc.) creep downhill under the action of a large variety of thermal, water, freeze-thaw, biological disturbances etc.  This slow downslope motion is important and we will examine in detail later.

c)      Does the angle of the slope affect the motion?

d)     (VERY hard) Assume the slab touches the underlying rock along its entire length, not just at the ends, now how fast does it move?  A complete answer would give a definite speed, however, a description of the details of motion is probably sufficient, but such a description should include a comment on the speed dependence on the slope angle, which is different from the answer to part c.