Mass Wasting and Weathering

As we push forward through this semester there was a very funny thing I noticed that had not really crossed my mind until I was looking at Skyrim. Mass wasting is generally aided in a big portion by gravity, but in one instance when I was playing gravity was influence by a giant dragon. This dragon landed on the side of a mountain and caused a big rock fall, which caused a translational rock slide on this mountain. By that I mean a big flat piece of the mountain broke off and slid down the front side of the mountain.

Image courtesy of Google Image. Dragon just landed on mountain side, making middle boulder topple, and land slide start.

To be honest it's hard to completely be able to identify certain formations in a video game because to a certain extent it is up to the artist and only so much has to be realistic and fit the mold. I found an example of this while I was playing, an Earth flow that according to the laws of physics probably shouldn't exist. What occurred, although the picture makes it hard to see, is a piece of land just missing, and no landslide to be found. Now just for reference, everything around the landslide looks as it should, just normal rock formations, but just under the missing piece of land, which looks to have started as a rotational slump, there is no mass from mass wasting. This is easily explainable saying that it's just a video game but in reality if they want to be as accurate as possible then they need the land that slid down from the gap to be there as well.

Image Courtesy of Skyrim and Google Image. Just found place where land displacement is very uneven and pieces of rock seem to just be missing.

So why is this mass wasting occurring in Skyrim? It's fairly simple, as we talked about in class you need a permeable surface in order to have mass wasting. As we learned rocks with cracks are definitely permeable surfaces, and these are very prevalent in Skyrim. Also there needs to be some sort of water to permeate the surface (in this case snow). Also occurring though we see the weathering of rocks from that same water. This water after it has melted off the snow caps runs down through a system of canals and rivers and ends up in lakes. Before it makes it all the way down though Skyrim artists did a very good job a how this water would weather the rocks it passes. My last picture touches on how this weather and erosion of rock will look in Skyrim. This is a process that occurs because of the water pushing force through and around rocks which over time takes the weaker rock away and shapes the rock in such a form that leaves only strong and sturdy rock.