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Lenticular —The units are overlapping lenses parallel to the soil surface. They are thickest in the middle and thin towards the edges. Lenticular structure is commonly associated with moist soils, texture classes high in silt or very fine sand (e.g., silt loam), and high potential for frost action. [5]
The mineral components of soil are sand, silt and clay, and their relative proportions determine a soil's texture. Properties that are influenced by soil texture include porosity, permeability, infiltration, shrink-swell rate, water-holding capacity, and susceptibility to erosion. In the illustrated USDA textural classification triangle, the ...
Photograph taken 21 March 2010 in Norwich, Vermont. Frost heaving (or a frost heave) is an upwards swelling of soil during freezing conditions caused by an increasing presence of ice as it grows towards the surface, upwards from the depth in the soil where freezing temperatures have penetrated into the soil (the freezing front or freezing boundary).
Needle ice is commonly found along stream banks or soil terraces. It is also found by gaps around stones and others areas of patterned ground. The variety of soil properties also affects where it is found. Places where the soil is much deeper and richer can affect the growth of the ice.
Frost weathering is the collective name for those forms of physical weathering that are caused by the formation of ice within rock outcrops. It was long believed that the most important of these is frost wedging, which is the widening of cracks or joints in rocks resulting from the expansion of porewater when it freezes. A growing body of ...
For example, if a soil is 70 percent sand and 10 percent clay then the soil is classified as a sandy loam. The same method can be used starting on any side of the soil triangle. If the texture by feel method was used to determine the soil type, the triangle can also provide a rough estimate on the percentages of sand, silt, and clay in the soil ...
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. For the clay ...
Soil biological processes are most important in soils that do not have 2:1 phyllosilicate clay minerals, and are therefore lacking in shrinking and swelling properties that can aid in structural formation. [12] Soil organisms can have an indirect and direct effects on soil structure at different levels of aggregate formation.