Stone steps erode with every footstep, leading to indents over time, right? But other things seem to erode on their own through time alone, so what causes that? Wind and rain? Would it therefore be correct to say that anything, if subjected to constantly running water, loses a few atoms every second and would eventually erode? Would this mean nothing is technically 100% waterproof? Or can things erode on their own without an external force? Thanks!
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Yes. In time, everything erodes. Wind, rain, running water….
Niagara Falls is eroding up the river. It’s moving by about a foot per year.
The Grand Canyon formed because the river slowly eroded away the surrounding rock.
The Appalachian Mountains once rose as high as the Himalayas, many many millions of years ago. Over time the wind and the rain slowly grinded them down.
Depends on the context.
On earth, everything is subject to atmospheric and environmental forces. So things erode more quickly than they would otherwise- like in space. Space still has forces that work to erode, but they tend to work over much longer time frames.
The Sun is “eroding,” in a sense and will ultimately collapse in 7 or 8 Billion years.
But then again, some eroding is just breaking into smaller parts, so is the original broken, or has it been miniaturized and multiplied?
If a boulder was once part of a tectonic plate, is the boulder the erosion, or does it stand alone, to further erode?
Ultimately the law of Conservation of Mass imposes that regardless of physical and chemical changes, the same amount of matter still persists.
I don’t think you’ve got your scales right with “loses a few atoms”. A penny weighs 2.5g, and is 97.5% zinc. That’s 0.2303×10^23 zinc atoms. Losing 23 atoms is 0.000000000000000000001%, unless I lost count with the 19 zeros. That’s 100% watertight, unless you’re in some weird scientific 24 significant digit problem.
What you described is the natural cycle of elements on earth- rocks are eroded by wind and water , the sediments settle under the oceans- which is then pushed back up by plate tectonics. But is your question more around energy in the universe?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/it-s-official-the-universe-is-dying-slowly/
Almost. Fundamental particles like electrons don’t have smaller components to decay into, but their wave functions would spread throughout the universe if not locally constrained by the forces in a proton.
Composite particles made of quarks, like Neutrons, can decay into other particles (the half life of a neutron is something like 15 minutes), but protons themselves are thought to be perfectly stable and never decay. Under Roger Penrose’s idea of conformal cyclic cosmology, protons can actually decay after an obscenely long time, which kickstarts another Big Bang after the heat death of the universe, because nothing has rest mass anymore, making the separate concepts of space and time essentially meaningless.
On Earth ice, water and wind (and the sand and other particles they carry) will erode everything over time. Even a meter thick piece of diamond would erode when gently sandblasted over millions of years.
Even without an atmosphere there are still forces at play. For example solar radiation and cosmic radiation which can knock apart molecules or even atoms. Radioactive decay also happens to a lot of atoms and their isotopes.
Entropy.
Everything in the universe is subject to entropy. i.e. moving from a state of higher energy to a more settled down lower energy state.
This is true for sub atomic particles as well as macro particles like sand, rock etc.
Erosion is just an act of entropy.
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