Talk:Scree

Scree vs Talus

hm, I've always used "scree" for small, loose rocks on a slope, the kind that slides down around your ankles when you try to walk across it. "Talus" in my experience means bigger blocks --big enough that you don't have to worry (much) about them shifting when you climb around on them-- piled up beneath the cliff they've fallen from. (Thus the name: "talus" means "earthwork" or "breastwork" in a couple of Romance languages.) Google image search for "scree" and "talus" suggests I'm not the only one making this distinction.

"Talus" can also be distinguished from "felsenmeer" - blocks of frost-shattered rock that form in place. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 12.45.242.3 (talk • contribs) 18:49, January 30, 2006 (UTC)

Yes I agree with 12.45.242.3

Scree is smaller chunks about dust-to-babyhead sized. Talus is blocky--everything from small boulders to enormous house-sized blocks.

However, scree tends to be a more commonly recognized term, and it does have a popular tendency to be applied to all sizes of rocky debris.

Psi4ce 03:00, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Link to Talus

I changed the word "talus" in this article from bold, to a link to "talus." The reason I did this is because the article clearly says that talus and scree are not the same, but does not say what talus is.

I have no idea what talus is, and the explanations on this talk page sounds reasonable to me.

Right now the link to "talus" is not very useful, since it links to the disambiguation page, which as an entry that takes you back to the "scree" article.

I can't fix this without some research because I don't know what "talus" is, but if someone does know what "talus" is with certainty, please follow these steps to correct the link:

• Create a page called "Talus (rock)" or something like that, and talk about talus.
• On the "Talus (disambiguation)" page, change the line that refers to "Scree" either to say only "Talus (rock)" or to say both of them "Talus (rock), or Scree" (depending on if you think the word talus is always something different than scree, or if talus is sometimes used to refer to either).
• In the "Scree" article (the one connected to this talk page), change the link for the word talus from talus to talus
• On this talk page, add a statement explaining the change, and remove this list of instructions.

--VegKilla 21:08, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Balancing on boulders

Is there any sources to this statement? "experienced mountaineers often rush down a scree by balancing on a large boulder which slides down by its increased weight" Sounds pretty impressive to me :) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 80.213.46.115 (talk • contribs) 22:03, June 4, 2006 (UTC)

Frost heaving?

The article says that scree/talus is created by frost heaving but that page says that frost heaving is a process that applies to soil, not rock. The article on spheroidal weathering refers to frost wedging, which sounds like a more accurate description of what is called "frost heaving" here. (IANAGeologist. Does it show? :-) ) Dricherby (talk) 12:41, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Images

Are the captioned images of the large blocks on Cross Fell and the glacier in Italy really scree? Withot being familiar with either location, from the images the former looks more like a blockfield and the latter like heaped up glacial debris. Geopersona (talk) 07:01, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

I think that you may well be correct to doubt that these photos can be definitely described as scree. The Cross Fell photo is too close up to get any sense of its wider landform context. The Italian example also shows no suitable slope from which rockfall may have occurred. It would not surprise me if your alternative suggestions of blockfield and moraine turned out to be more accurate descriptions for these two examples, therefore making them unsuitable for inclusion in this article because they would lack the rockfall/mass wasting element of scree formation. Perhaps they should be replaced by more definite examples? GeoWriter (talk) 11:49, 11 January 2017 (UTC)