It has been known for many years that soil cracks enhance drying of the soil matrix. Previous field and laboratory experiments established the magnitude of drying in the vicinity of cracks, the amount of drying under various conditions (e.g., wind, radiative heating, crack aperture), and developed agricultural practices to ameliorate the effect of cracks on crop productivity. Recently, we posed a conceptual model for a mechanism that would drive enhanced drying from soil cracks. Typically, drying progresses as follows: Nighttime convective venting of the air within the crack replaces the moist air within the crack with drier atmospheric air; the decrease in relative humidity within the crack drives evaporation of pore-water along the crack walls; drying of crack walls increases matric suction near the walls and drives pore-water toward the crack from the soil matrix, leading to internal drying of the soil matrix; and as pore-water is driven towards the soil crack and evaporates, salts concentrate and precipitate along the crack wall. Convective venting is the key mechanism driving the drying process. Each wall forming the crack maintains thermal conditions with a vertical thermal gradient that oscillates diurnally. Convective venting occurs at night when either the vertical thermal gradient within the crack is significantly unstable (Rayleigh-Bernard instability) or when the density gradient at the atmosphere boundary permits entrainment of cooler (and usually drier) atmospheric air (Rayleigh-Taylor instability), thus generating invasive fingers of cooler atmospheric air. To be presented is evidence for the existence of this mechanism in natural settings, quantification of convective dynamics within a natural vadose-zone crack, and discussion of the implication of the mechanism to salt redistribution within the nearby porous media.