Global warming impacts on rockfall frequency and magnitude due to changing frost distribution and frost cracking effectiveness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The distribution of freezing and thawing within rock masses is time varying (day to day or season to season) and controls the effectiveness of the frost cracking processes from the surface until various depths. These processes are major contributors to the development of rock instabilities. By altering the thermal regime of rockwalls, global warming could have a major impact on rockfall dynamic by the end of the 21st century. This study seeks to improve our understanding of the influence of this warming on (i) the distribution of freezing and thawing within rock masses, (ii) the effectiveness of frost cracking and (iii) the frequency and magnitude of rockfalls. Thermistor sensors inserted in a 5.5‐m horizontal borehole and a weather station were installed on a vertical rockwall located in the northern Gaspé Peninsula (Canada). This instrumentation was used to calculate the surface energy balance of the rockwall and to measure and model its thermal regime at depth over a period of 28 months. Combining locally recorded historical air temperature data with simulated future data (scenarios RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) made it possible to extend the rockwall thermal regime model over the period 1950–2100. The effectiveness of frost cracking over this 150‐year period has been quantified using a thermomechanical model. Depending on the scenario, warming of 3.3°C to 6.2°C is expected on the northern Gaspé Peninsula by the end of the 21st century. This rapid warming is likely to decrease the maximum depth reaches by the seasonal frost by 1–2 m and shorten its duration by 1–3 months. The frequency of freeze–thaw cycles could increase twelvefold in January. Frost cracking effectiveness should intensify around 70 cm in depth and disappear beyond that (RCP4.5) or diminish starting at 10 cm in depth (RCP8.5). In areas subject to seasonal freeze–thaw cycles, decimetric rockfall frequency could grow considerably in winter but be significantly reduced in fall and spring. Furthermore, frost cracking would cease contributing to the development of larger magnitude instabilities.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".