Regolith research in Australia

Regolith science is a multidisciplinary, comparatively recent field, having evolved from several older disciplines: geology, geomorphology, soil science, and geography. Initially, practitioners drew on terms from these varied sources, not always understanding them fully or using them accurately, leading to persistent misunderstandings and confusion around terminology. The term “regolith” was introduced by Merrill (1897), who wrote of the incoherent mass of varying thickness covering the underlying rocks, later clarified and redefined in The Regolith Glossary (Eggleton 2001) as: “the entire unconsolidated or secondarily recemented cover that overlies more coherent bedrock, that has been formed by weathering, erosion, trans-port and/or deposition of the older material. The regolith thus includes fractured and weathered basement rocks, saprolites,soils, organic accumulations, volcanic material, glacial depos-its, colluvium, alluvium, evaporitic sediments, aeolian deposits and groundwater”. Or, in simple terms: “everything from fresh rock, to fresh air.” Most of the continents, which were once part of Gondwana (Africa, India, Australia and South America), have old land surfaces and deep regolith. However, the extent of regolith and its preservation in Australia are exceptional. The Australian land-scape is remarkable for its relative flatness, dominated by low elevations (Pain, Pillans, Roach, Worrall, & Wilford, 2012) with some areas exposed at the surface since the Precambrian, some since the Paleozoic and the rest since the Mesozoic or Cenozoic. This results in ancient weathering mantles that, may be over100 m thick. Significant denudation is predominantly limited tothe continental margins, resulting in old landforms and weathering profiles that are much more likely to persist in Australia than in other Gondwanan continents (Scott & Pain, 2008) Citation: Thomas, M., & Wong, V. N. L. (2017). 'Regolith research in Australia'. Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, 64(8), pp. 983–985. doi:10.1080/08120099.2017.1396252