Weathering in cold regions: some thoughts and perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Weathering in cold regions has primarily focused on the notion of ‘cold’, such that process and landform theory have generally used this both as the developmental criterion and as the outcome of palaeoenvironmental reconstructions based on landforms or sediments. As a result of this approach, the process focus in terms of weathering has been that mechanical processes predominate, with freeze-thaw weathering as the prime agent, and that chemical processes are temperature-inhibited, often to the point of nonoccurrence. Here a reconsideration of the whole conceptual framework of weathering in cold environments is undertaken. It is shown that, contrary to popular presentations, weathering, including chemical weathering, is not temperature-limited but rather is limited by moisture availability. Indeed, summer, and oft-times even winter, rock temperatures are more than adequate to support mechanical and chemical weathering if water is present. Where water is available it is clearly shown that chemical weathering can be a major component of the weathering regime. The argument is made that there is no zonality to cold environment weathering as none of the processes or process associations are unique to cold regions; indeed, many cold regions show similar weathering assemblages to those in hot arid regions. Process-form relationships are also questioned. The assumption of angularity with weathering in cold regions is questioned, all the more so as hot arid studies identify exactly the same angularity of debris form. Further, that all forms have to be angular is shown by field examples to be no more than an artefact of original unquestioning and oft-repeated assumptions, now over a century or more old. The argument is made that there is a strong need for the reconsideration of the nature of weathering in cold environments, that current theory should be questioned and challenged, and field observation undertaken within this revised frame of reference.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".