Silt Silt can be visually observed with a hand lens, exhibiting a sparkly appearance. It also can be felt by the tongue as granular when placed on the front teeth (even when mixed with clay particles). Silt is created by a variety of physical processes capable of splitting the generally sand-sized quartz crystals of primary rocks by exploiting deficiencies in their lattice. These involve chemical weathering of rock and regolith, and a number of physical weathering processes such as frost shattering and haloclasty. The main process is abrasion through transport, including fluvial comminution, aeolian attrition and glacial grinding. It is in
Granular material the partitions rather than spread evenly into both partitions as would happen in a conventional gas. This effect, known as the granular Maxwell's demon, does not violate any thermodynamics principles since energy is constantly being lost from the system in the process. Granular systems are known to exhibit jamming and undergo a jamming transition which is thought of as a thermodynamic phase transition to a jammed state. The Lubachevsky-Stillinger algorithm of jamming allows one to produce simulated jammed granular configurations. Excited granular matter is a rich pattern-forming system. Some of the pattern-forming behaviours seen in granular materials are: Some of