Abstract
Soil depth tends to vary from a few centimeters to several meters, depending on many natural and environmental factors. We hypothesize that the cumulative effect of these factors on soil depth, which is chiefly dependent on the process of biogeochemical weathering, is particularly affected by soil porewater (i.e., solute) transport and infiltration from the land surface. Taking into account evidence for a non-Gaussian distribution of rock weathering rates, we propose a simple mathematical model to describe the relationship between soil depth and infiltration flux. The model was tested using several areas in mostly semi-arid climate zones. The application of this model demonstrates the use of fundamental principles of physics to quantify the coupled effects of the five principal soil-forming factors of Dokuchaev.
Highlights
The concepts of soil formation have been extensively examined, starting from the beginning of the19th century (Justus von Leibig: see http://www.madehow.com/knowledge/Justus_von_Liebig.html), and thereafter modified and refined by many world-renowned soil scientists, e.g., Charles Darwin [1]in England, Vasily Dokuchaev [2] in Russia, and Grove Karl Gilbert [3], George Nelson Coffey [4], and Eugene W
As Roering points out, such problems have been addressed by incorporating soil depth-dependent transport as well as soil production into landscape evolution models [66,67], which allows an increase in soil transport rates downslope even in the case of planar slopes
In the case of calculations for the time required to strip a landscape of soil, we used an arbitrary starting depth of 1 m, in approximate accord with our general predictions, Roering’s [61] equation, and, as it turns out, with steady-state depths calculated from Equation (2) in accord with the input erosion rates given by Montgomery [27]
Summary
The concepts of soil formation have been extensively examined, starting from the beginning of the. A guiding convention has been that soil is predominantly formed due to biogeochemical weathering, as a combination of physical, chemical, thermal, and biological processes together causing the disintegration of rocks, an evolutionary process that does not stop with the initial formation of soil. These processes, themselves, are limited by the atmosphere–rhizosphere, subsurface interaction, and in particular, infiltration from the land surface and solute transport in the unsaturated (vadose) zone. We consider the implications of our model treatment and its wide range of applicability for landscape evolution concepts and discussions of agricultural sustainability
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