Do you believe soil is a 'living entity' or 'natural body'?
Yet, if it is a form of life, then - like all life - it must have evolved.
But until now, most people have just presumed it is there.
Under our feet, as if it has always been here.
But it must have arrived somehow
How, when, what, where, and why?
ON THE ORIGIN OF SOILS
BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION
If the soil is a 'living entity', then it must have evolved.
This, according to Darwin’s theory, would have been by means of 'natural selection'.
This site picks up from where Darwin left off ...
A Ground-breaking Piece of Soil Ecology'
Biological Recording Company with Kerry Calloway
My question. Did Charles offer a view of when/how earthworms evolved?
Kerry: "I’ve not seen any reference from Darwin regarding earthworm evolution. He doesn’t talk about this in his earthworm book and I don’t recall them being mentioned (at least in any significant way) in On the Origin of Species." I believe it is around 200 mya
Have you ever wondered: "How did all that heavy brownish soil stuff get under my feet?" There are one and a half tons in per cubic meter of healthy soil, equivalent . In terms of life, can you imagine a medium sized whale crushed up into that volume?
While many call this planet 'Earth', most of us take this brown stuff for granted. Yet it must have come from somewhere at some time in history. All the different creatures and constructs which make 'soil' so unique could not have arrived together. So how did all this soil get here? This, I believe, is the first time anybody has worked out in detail how soil evolved and came to be under our feet. (is a Japanese version).
The complex story of how life came on to land is often called 'terrestrialisation. When using this term, there is talk about 'colonisation of land', as if the organisms establish themselves 'on' land. That could not have happened without soil, yet most versions of terrestrialisation do not include soil - often because they are written by non-soil scientists. Animals and plants would soon die, as they could not have developed adaptations to dry life on land overnight, but would require a very long time. Here we talk of the 'construction of soil' as that key to life on land. That construction could not have been a single event, but evolved millions of years, sometimes slowly sometimes in bursts.
This site aims to:
Bring the soil to life, showing the underground architecture of soil cities and their inhabitants.
Work out how soil came to be here, as it evolved over millions of years.
Develop better understanding of the functions of soil and how that may help us in the future.
There is no sign of soil - as we would recognise today (although various sorts of 'palaeosols' date back over 3.5 Ga) for the first 4 billion years on this planet. During this time there were powerful physical, chemical and biological reactions between land, air, and water, but it is only the last tenth of the life of planet earth, that soil as we know it has developed. Only recently have we recognised that soil is a living entity. If so, it must have evolved. We will dig deep to unearth lots of research to find out about how this evolution involving animals, plants, and minerals took place over hundreds of millions of years. What makes soil so special?........
the 'Origin of Soils'
The previoulsy untold 'story of soil' sees soil in a new way.
Here we try and work out how the soil evolved from sparse beginnings to those tons of living material under our feet. By following its development, we may be able to make more sense of some of the great mysteries that went on above ground, like insects' emergence and flowering plants' rapid explosion.
We are going to do this as if we were a tiny animal (about 0.05% your size) moving through dark deep damp tunnels - the brown planet - for hundreds of millions of years.
Malling Rhizotron looking at their rootstocks