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Gay Head Cliffs in Martha's Vineyard consist almost entirely of clay. A Quaternary clay deposit in Estonia, laid down about 400,000 years ago. Clay is a type of fine-grained natural soil material containing clay minerals [1] (hydrous aluminium phyllosilicates, e.g. kaolinite, Al 2 Si 2 O 5 4).
A soil family category is a group of soils within a subgroup and describes the physical and chemical properties which affect the response of soil to agricultural management and engineering applications. The principal characteristics used to differentiate soil families include texture, mineralogy, pH, permeability, structure, consistency, the ...
Fats and waxes from plant matter have still more resistance to decomposition and persist in soils for thousand years, hence their use as tracers of past vegetation in buried soil layers. [166] Clay soils often have higher organic contents that persist longer than soils without clay as the organic molecules adhere to and are stabilised by the ...
Soil texture triangle showing the USDA classification system based on grain size Map of global soil regions from the USDA. For soil resources, experience has shown that a natural system approach to classification, i.e. grouping soils by their intrinsic property (soil morphology), behaviour, or genesis, results in classes that can be interpreted for many diverse uses.
Bulk density (g/cm 3) Pore space (%) Tilled surface soil of a cotton field 1.3: 51 Trafficked inter-rows where wheels passed surface 1.67: 37 Traffic pan at 25 cm deep 1.7: 36 Undisturbed soil below traffic pan, clay loam 1.5: 43 Rocky silt loam soil under aspen forest 1.62: 40 Loamy sand surface soil 1.5: 43 Decomposed peat 0.55: 65
A soil type is a taxonomic unit in soil science. All soils that share a certain set of well-defined properties form a distinctive soil type. [1] Soil type is a technical term of soil classification, the science that deals with the systematic categorization of soils. Every soil of the world belongs to a certain soil type. Soil type is an ...
In soils, clay is a soil textural class and is defined in a physical sense as any mineral particle less than 2 μm (8 × 10 −5 in) in effective diameter. Many soil minerals, such as gypsum , carbonates, or quartz, are small enough to be classified as clay based on their physical size, but chemically they do not afford the same utility as do ...
The thickness of the zone of capillary saturation depends on the pore size, but typically, the heights vary between a centimeter or so for coarse sand to tens of meters for a silt or clay. [3] In fact the pore space of soil is a uniform fractal e.g. a set of uniformly distributed D-dimensional fractals of average linear size L.