Remote Sensing Tutorial Page 17-5 Other processes besides running water modify the Earth s surface. Percolating ground water can dissolve sedimentary carbonate rocks, leaving sinkholes and other bedrock irregularities that fall into the category of Karst topography. Wind can alter surface materials, especially in desert climates, both by erosion and by deposition. Great accumulations of ice flow under its own weight, carving out mountainous terrain in valley or piedmont glaciers and cutting away at the surface as continental-scale ice sheets spread great distances. Parts of continents subjected to Pleistocene glaciation also have distinctive landforms due to deposition of debris eroded by these ice masses.
Solution often begins in and extends from structural joints.
Expansion of dissolved volumes may leave the rock units between them as residual peaks or towers. Nowhere in the world is this more spectacularly developed than in the Guangxi Province of Southern China. In the image pair below, a group of towers appears on the left and a Landsat image of a region west of Guilin, a popular tourist center in China, on the right. The karst topography in this scene appears in the darker-toned surfaces. These karsts are a thick series of carbonate rocks that elsewhere in the image have their outer rock removed to expose older non-carbonates underneath.