I was hiking today and there was a lot of dirt/sand and it got me thinking there’s all rock eventually break down to dirt given enough time? like if I took a pile of gravel and left it out long enough and came back in amount of years would it literally be a pile of dust at some point if so, how? And sorry one more question if you put that same gravel in a secure covered area where the weather or really anything couldn’t get to it in 1 million years. Would it still look exactly like gravel?
In: Planetary Science
That’s basically what sand is – a ground stone. And clay and dust.
So yes, gravel would turn into dust. But, something has to *turn* it into dust. Like water, wind, gasses from temperature change and such. Cliffs are millions, if not billions of years old. Yes, they’re quite different from what they were originally, but they’re still cliffs. For rocks, time runs quite slow.
And, powdered rocks are always sandstone or limestone and such. The softer ones. It depends on composition of the rock. You don’t find as much granite gravel in nature, aside from beaches (water is much better at breaking rock than air) or places that took the worst from ice ages.
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