A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
tafoni
Tafoni are cavities weathered into a rock face, rounded and smooth-walled, often opening into one another so that a cliff becomes a honeycomb of hollows with thin partitions between them. They range from an inch to room-size. They occur in sandstone, granite, and volcanic rock, and are most common in coastal and desert settings where salt is available.
Etymology
The word came into English from Corsican and Sicilian, where it means a window or a hole, and it was taken into geology in the nineteenth century from the granite coasts of Corsica. The singular is tafone. English also calls the smaller version honeycomb weathering and the larger version a cavernous hollow, and neither is as good a word.
Notes
Salt does most of the work. Salt in solution soaks into the rock, crystallizes as it dries, and the growing crystals push grains apart, and once a hollow starts it stays damper and shadier than the surface around it, so the process concentrates and the cavity deepens.