Moisture dynamics controls rock elasticity from weakening to stiffening
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Water is ubiquitous in crustal rocks and has been independently shown to increase and decrease rock elasticity via adsorption-induced weakening and saturation-related stiffening. Yet, the interplay of how weakening and stiffening effects concurrently control the rock elasticity remains unclear. Here, we examine the acousto-mechanical behavior of a free-standing sandstone subjected to gradual water infiltration with a downward-moving wetting front over 7 days. Using time-lapse ultrasonic and digital imaging techniques, we observe elastic weakening ahead of the wetting front, which is explained by an analytical model linking P-wave velocity decrease, adsorption-induced expansion and surface energy decrease established at the grain scale. As the wetting front moves through the probed region, the weakening effect diminishes, and P-wave velocity begins to increase, consistent with findings in granite. This shift is attributed to saturation-related stiffening, supported by an analytical model of partial water saturation. A numerical model simulating the profile of water saturation and vapor further validates these observations. Our research sheds light on a key question in rock deformation: how weakening and stiffening effects jointly control rock deformation during progressive wetting.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".