A University of Wyoming researcher and his team discovered that weathering of subsurface rock in the Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains of California occurs due more to rocks expanding than from chemical decomposition, as previously thought.

Porosity, the void space in rock, was conventionally thought to be produced when water flows through the rock, thus resulting in minerals chemically dissolving. Because mountain watershed provides large reservoirs of water, the new findings are relevant to water resource management throughout the U.S.