Frost heaving

Frost heaving (or a frost heave) is an upwards swelling of soil during freezing conditions caused by an increasing presence of ice as it grows towards the surface, upwards from the depth in the soil where freezing temperatures have penetrated into the soil (the freezing front or freezing boundary). Ice growth requires a water supply that delivers water to the freezing front via capillary action in certain soils. The weight of overlying soil restrains vertical growth of the ice and can promote the formation of lens-shaped areas of ice within the soil. Yet the force of one or more growing ice lenses is sufficient to lift a layer of soil, as much as 1 foot (0.30 metres) or more. The soil through which water passes to feed the formation of ice lenses must be sufficiently porous to allow capillary action, yet not so porous as to break capillary continuity. Such soil is referred to as "frost susceptible". The growth of ice lenses continually consumes the rising water at the freezing front. Differential frost heaving can crack road surfaces—contributing to springtime pothole formation—and damage building foundations.

Needle ice is essentially frost heaving that occurs at the beginning of the freezing season, before the freezing front has penetrated very far into the soil and there is no soil overburden to lift as a frost heave.

According to Beskow, Urban Hjärne (1641–1724) described frost effects in soil in 1694. By 1930, Stephen Taber (1882–1963), head of the Department of Geology at the University of South Carolina (Columbia, South Carolina), had disproved the hypothesis that frost heaving results from molar volume expansion with freezing of water already present in the soil prior to the onset of subzero temperatures, i.e. with little contribution from migration of water within the soil.

Since the molar volume of water expands by about 9% as it changes phase from water to ice at its bulk freezing point, 9% would be the maximum expansion possible owing to molar volume expansion, and even then only if the ice were rigidly constrained laterally in the soil so that the entire volume expansion had to occur vertically. Ice is unusual among compounds because it increases in molar volume from its liquid state, water. Most compounds decrease in volume when changing phase from liquid to solid. Taber showed that the vertical displacement of soil in frost heaving can be significantly greater than that due to molar volume expansion.

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