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Soil, also commonly referred to as earth, is a mixture of organic matter, minerals, gases, liquids, and organisms that together support the life of plants and soil organisms. Some scientific definitions distinguish dirt from soil by restricting the former term specifically to displaced soil. Soil measuring and surveying device
Soil texture is determined by the relative proportion of the three kinds of soil mineral particles, called soil separates: sand, silt, and clay. At the next larger scale, soil structures called peds or more commonly soil aggregates are created from the soil separates when iron oxides , carbonates , clay, silica and humus , coat particles and ...
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 ...
Topsoil is composed of mineral particles and organic matter and usually extends to a depth of 5-10 inches (13–25 cm). Together these make a substrate capable of holding water and air which encourages biological activity.
Soil microbes decompose it through enzymatic biochemical processes, obtain the necessary energy from the same matter, and produce the mineral compounds that plant roots are apt to absorb. [12] The decomposition of organic compounds specifically into mineral, i. e., inorganic, compounds is denominated " mineralization ".
In geology and mineralogy, a mineral or mineral species is, ... The group's scope includes mineral-forming microorganisms, which exist on nearly every rock, soil, ...
The soil mineral apatite is the most common mineral source of phosphorus, from which it can be extracted by microbial and root exudates, [79] [80] with an important contribution of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. [81] The most common form of organic phosphate is phytate, the principal storage form of phosphorus in many plant tissues.
The mineral material from which a soil forms is called parent material. Rock, whether its origin is igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic, is the source of all soil mineral materials and the origin of all plant nutrients with the exceptions of nitrogen, hydrogen and carbon.