The reduction of a component of a rock, soil or landscape into a more rudimentary form by decomposition, disintegration or erosion. The wearing down of a land surface, or the progressive modification of soil by leaching into more acid varieties. In soil mineralogy the word is used to describe the process by which an inherited mineral is transformed into a clay mineral in one or more stages, each stage retaining part of the structure of a preceding stage: for example the sequence vermiculite→smectite→kaolinite (Evans, 1992, fig. 5.3).
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Evans, L.J., 1992. Alteration products at the earth's surface – the clay minerals. (Chapter 5) In Martini, I.P., and Chesworth, W., ed., Weathering, soils & paleosols. Amsterdam; New York: Elsevier, pp 107–125.
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(2008). Degradation. In: Chesworth, W. (eds) Encyclopedia of Soil Science. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-3995-9_148
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