ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Earth's three grand cycles of matter – the water cycle, the rock cycle, and the biogeochemical cycles – affect surface processes. It explains that denudation encompasses weathering and erosion, erosive agents – ice, water, and wind – picking up weathered debris, transporting it, and depositing it; that transport requires gravitational, fluid, water pressure, expansion, or biological forces to set material in motion and keep it moving, and that eroded materials eventually come to rest to form deposits which are clastic (solid fragments), chemical (precipitated materials), or biogenic (produced by living things) sediments. These sediments accumulate in three main environments: the land surface, around continental edges, and on the open ocean floor. The chapter also explains how climate, rock type, and topographic factors partly determine denudation. It then discusses the complex interactions between climate, topography, and plate tectonic processes, and the effect that erosion of mountains has on the long-term carbon dioxide balance of the atmosphere, influencing long-term climatic change.
