Dirt. David R. Montgomery
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Despite the occasional mass extinction, life and soils symbiotically grew and diversified through climate changes and shifting arrangements of continents.
As soil completes the cycle of life by decomposing and recycling organic matter and regenerating the capacity to support plants, it serves as a filter that cleanses and converts dead stuff into nutrients that feed new life. Soil is the interface between the rock that makes up our planet and the plants and animals that live off sunlight and nutrients leached out of rocks. Plants take carbon directly from the air and water from the soil, but just as in a factory, shortages of essential components limit soil productivity. Three elements—nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus—usually limit plant growth and control the productivity of whole ecosystems. But in the big picture, soil regulates the transfer of elements from inside the earth to the surrounding atmosphere. Life needs erosion to keep refreshing the soil—just not so fast as to sweep it away altogether.
At the most fundamental level, terrestrial life needs soil—and life plus dirt, in turn, make soil. Darwin estimated that almost four hundred pounds of worms lived in an acre of good English soil. Rich topsoil also harbors microorganisms that help plants get nutrients from organic matter and mineral soil. Billions of microscopic bugs can live in a handful of topsoil; those in a pound of fertile dirt outnumber Earth's human population. That's hard to imagine when you're packed into the Tokyo subway or trying to make your way down the streets of Calcutta or New York City. Yet our reality is built on, and in many ways depends upon, the invisible world of microbes that accelerate the release of nutrients and decay of organic matter, making the land hospitable for plants and therefore people.
Tucked away out of sight, soil-dwelling organisms account for much of the biodiversity of terrestrial ecosystems. Plants supply underground biota with energy by providing organic matter through leaf litter and the decay of dead plants and animals. Soil organisms, in turn, supply plants with nutrients by accelerating rock weathering and the decomposition of organic matter. Unique symbiotic communities of soil-dwelling organisms form under certain plant communities. This means that changes in plant communities lead to changes in the soil biota that can affect soil fertility and, in turn, plant growth.
Along with Darwin's worms, an impressive array of physical and chemical processes help build soil. Burrowing animals—like gophers, termites, and ants—mix broken rock into the soil. Roots pry rocks apart. Falling trees churn up rock fragments and mix them into the soil. Formed under great pressure deep within the earth, rocks expand and crack apart as they near the ground. Big rocks break down into little rocks and eventually into their constituent mineral grains owing to stresses from wetting and drying, freezing and thawing, or heating by wildfires. Some rock-forming minerals, like quartz, are quite resistant to chemical attack. They just break down into smaller and smaller pieces of the same stuff. Other minerals, particularly feldspars and micas, readily weather into clays.
Too small to see individually, clay particles are small enough for dozens to fit on the period at the end of this sentence. All those microscopic clays fit together tightly enough to seal the ground surface and promote runoff of rainwater. Although fresh clay minerals are rich in plant nutrients, once clay absorbs water it holds onto it tenaciously. Clay-rich soils drain slowly and form a thick crust when dry. Far larger, even the smallest sand grains are visible to the naked eye. Sandy soil drains rapidly, making it difficult for plants to grow. Intermediate in size between sand and clay, silt is ideal for growing crops because it retains enough water to nourish plants, yet drains quickly enough to prevent waterlogging. In particular, the mix of clay, silt, and sand referred to as loam makes the ideal agricultural soil because it allows for free air circulation, good drainage, and easy access to plant nutrients.
Clay minerals are peculiar in that they have a phenomenal amount of surface area. There can be as much as two hundred acres of mineral surfaces in half a pound of clay. Like the thin pieces of paper that compose a deck of cards, clay is made up of layered minerals with cations—like potassium, calcium, and magnesium—sandwiched in between silicate sheets. Water that works its way into the clay structure can dissolve cations, contributing to a soil solution rich in plant-essential nutrients.
Fresh clays therefore make for fertile soil, with lots of cations loosely held on mineral surfaces. But as weathering continues, more of the nutrients get leached from a soil as fewer elements remain sandwiched between the silicates. Eventually, few nutrients are left for plants to use. Although clays can also bind soil organic matter, replenishing the stock of essential nutrients like phosphorus and sulfur depends on weathering to liberate new nutrients from fresh rock.
In contrast, most nitrogen enters soils from biological fixation of atmospheric nitrogen. While there is no such thing as a nitrogen-fixing plant, bacteria symbiotic with plant hosts, like clover (to name but one), reduce inert atmospheric nitrogen to biologically active ammonia in root nodules 2—3 mm long. Once incorporated into soil organic matter, nitrogen can circulate from decaying things back into plants as soil microflora secrete enzymes that break down large organic polymers into soluble forms, such as amino acids, that plants can take up and reuse.
How fast soil is produced depends on environmental conditions. In 1941 UC Berkeley professor Hans Jenny proposed that the character of a soil reflected topography, climate, and biology superimposed on the local geology that provides raw materials from which soil comes. Jenny identified five key factors governing soil formation: parent material (rocks), climate, organisms, topography, and time.
The geology of a region controls the kind of soil produced when rocks break down, as they eventually must when exposed at the earth's surface. Granite decomposes into sandy soils. Basalt makes clay-rich soils. Limestone just dissolves away, leaving behind rocky landscapes with thin soils and lots of caves. Some rocks weather rapidly to form thick soils; others resist erosion and only slowly build up thin soils. Because the nutrients available to plants depend on the chemical composition of the soil's parent material, understanding soil formation begins with the rocks from which the soil originates.
Topography also affects the soil. Thin soils with fresh minerals blanket steep slopes in areas where geologic activity raised mountains and continues to refresh slopes. The gentle slopes of geologically quieter landscapes tend to have thicker, more deeply weathered soils.
Climate strongly influences soil formation. High rainfall rates and hot temperatures favor chemical weathering and the conversion of rock-forming minerals into clays. Cold climates accelerate the mechanical breakdown of rocks into small pieces through expansion and contraction during freeze-thaw cycles. At the same time, cold temperatures retard chemical weathering. So alpine and polar soils tend to have lots of fresh mineral surfaces that can yield new nutrients, whereas tropical soils tend to make poor agricultural soils because they consist of highly weathered clays leached of nutrients.
Temperature and rainfall primarily control the plant communities that characterize different ecosystems. At high latitudes, perpetually frozen ground can support only the low scrub of arctic tundra. Moderate temperatures and rainfall in temperate latitudes support forests that produce organic-rich soils by dropping their leaves to rot on the ground. Drier grassland soils that support a lot of microbial activity receive organic matter both from the recycling of dead roots and leaves and from the manure of grazing animals. Arid environments typically have thin rocky soils with sparse vegetation. Hot temperatures and high rainfall near the equator produce lush rainforests growing on leached-out soils by recycling nutrients inherited from weathering and recycled from decaying vegetation. In this way, global climate zones set the template upon which soils and vegetation communities evolved.
Differences in geology and climate make soils in different regions more or less capable of sustained agriculture. In particular, the abundant rainfall and high weathering rates on the gentle slopes of many tropical landscapes mean that after enough time, rainfall seeping into the ground leaches out almost all of the nutrients from both the soil and the weathered rocks beneath the soil. Once this happens, the lush vegetation essentially feeds on itself, retaining and recycling nutrients inherited from rocks weathered long ago. As most of the nutrients in these areas reside not in the soil but in the plants themselves, once the native vegetation disappears, so does the productive capacity of the soil. Often too few nutrients remain to support either crops or livestock within decades of deforestation. Nutrient-poor tropical soils illustrate the