Lecture
IUPUI students look into the mouth of Hidden River Cavern in Horse Cave, Kentucky. The cave's natural opening sits within a sinkhole; and the cave system lies underneath the small town of Horse Cave near Mammoth Cave National Park. Click for a larger image. (Photo: G. Rosenberg / IUPUI Earth Sciences.)Surficial processes generically refer to the movement or alteration of Earth material on or near Earth’s surface. We will take a look at the types of processes that occur on Earth’s surface, and then investigate the natural and human induced factors that cause these processes to happen. Finally, we’ll dive into more detail by expanding our knowledge on caves, which is a surficial processed induced by ground and surface water and closely related to the same factors that form sinkholes.
This lecture is broken down into three sections:
- Types: Slides, Creep, Subsidence, and Sinkholes
- Processes: Natural Causes, Human Causes, Prevention
- Caves: Karst Landscapes and Cave Formation Processes
You can click the tabs across the top of the page to access the three sections of the surficial processes lecture.