WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2025
Do you like to go for rides in the car? Maybe your family piles in and heads to Grandma’s house or to a soccer game. Family time in the car can be a fun way to get from Point A to Point B.
If you get to ride on smooth interstates, you probably enjoy the comfortable ride of today’s modern vehicles. From time to time, though, you may have to travel on smaller roads and streets. Occasionally, you’ll run into or over—usually with a big “whoomph!”—a hole in the road. It can jar your entire body, making you feel the bump to the depths of your bones.
What are we talking about? Today’s Wonder of the Day takes an up-close look at those roadway obstacles we call “potholes.” Depending upon where you live, you may have heard them called something else. You might say they’re “kettles” or, in the Western United States, even “chuckholes.”
Potholes are areas of road surface that have cracked, worn away, and eventually formed a hole. They start out as tiny cracks. If they’re not fixed right away, they can grow. Potholes may be anywhere from a few inches wide and deep to a few feet wide and several inches deep.
When vehicles travel on highways and city streets, they rely on a flat, smooth surface. This helps them move quickly, comfortably, and safely. Potholes make a ride bumpy and potentially dangerous. They can damage vehicle tires and even affect the alignment of a vehicle’s wheels.
Potholes develop naturally as a result of many scientific forces at work. It’s fun to drive on a newly paved road. But all that traffic takes its toll over time. Just think about what a beating the average roadway takes as millions of tires move across it at a high speed.
The friction of the tires with the roadway surface heats up the road and causes it to expand. Over time, this expansion can lead to the formation of cracks in the roadway surface. Water can then seep into these cracks.
Particularly in cooler weather, the freeze and thaw cycle can turn those tiny cracks into potholes in a hurry. When water from rain or snow seeps deep into roadway cracks, it can freeze when temperatures plummet at night. As water freezes, it expands, pushing against the edges of cracks. If it has seeped underneath the top layer of pavement, it can push up against the pavement from below.
When the temperature rises again, the water melts, leaving larger cracks—often called divots—throughout the roadway surface. Divots that form underneath the top layer of pavement can become potholes quickly. When vehicles drive over pavement with a divot below it, the weight can push the top layer of pavement into the space created by the divot. This leaves a hole in the roadway surface: a pothole!
Potholes occur in all roads, though. Just because you live in an area where it’s always warm doesn’t mean you’ll avoid potholes. Water has a way of eating away at road surfaces in any climate. Even without a freeze and thaw cycle, water can still get underneath pavement and create divots by eroding the materials, such as loose gravel, that form the roadbed.
Fortunately, road maintenance crews can fix potholes easily. Fixing a pothole requires a crew to clean all the loose rock and dirt out of the pothole before filling it with a mixture of hot or cold asphalt (depending upon the time of year) to create a patch in the roadway surface. Sometimes special chemicals are also used that act like a glue to make the asphalt patch stick to the surrounding pavement. You can think of this method as similar to the way a dentist fills a cavity in your teeth!
Have you ever been in a car or bus that hit a pothole? If so, you know just how annoying they can be! Most drivers will avoid them if they can. And of course, the largest potholes need to be fixed quickly to avoid damage to vehicles!
Standards:CCRA.L.3, CCRA.L.6, CCRA.R.1, CCRA.R.2, CCRA.R.4, CCRA.R.10, CCRA.SL.1, CCRA.SL.2
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Wonder Words (9)
seep
cycle
friction
alignment
expansion
plummet
divot
asphalt
obstacles
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Tomorrow’s Wonder of the Day takes you on a fantastic voyage to Southeast Asia!
Try It Out
Ready to explore the science of potholes in greater depth? Check out one or more of the following activities with a friend or family member:
Do you have a better understanding now of how potholes form? If you're a visual learner, it often helps to see a graphic that helps to explain things in a way that's easier to see with your eyes. Jump online and check out the Birth of a Pothole graphic. Use the graphic to explain to a friend or family member what you've learned about potholes and how they form!What better way to get up close and personal with the subject of today's Wonder of the Day than finding some potholes on your own? If you live in an area that has plenty of paved roads, it shouldn't take long to find a few examples of potholes. Make sure you have an adult go with you to search. Stay away from traffic and busy streets. It's best to search for potholes in residential areas where there's less traffic. Once you find a pothole or two, examine them closely. What do you see? Can you see evidence of water in the pothole? Are there other cracks in the road in the same area that could turn into potholes? If the pothole you found is at least a couple of inches deep, you might want to consider reporting it to your local street authority.Up for a challenge? Learn How To Repair Driveway Cracks yourself! Are there any cracks like these on your driveway or sidewalk? If you decide to try putting your new knowledge to the test, you'll need help from an adult. It'll also probably require a trip to the store for a few supplies. Have fun learning about road repair and how you can do some of these repairs yourself!
Posted 11:51 AM