This had to happen sooner or later.2015 is UN "Year of the Soil". I found an uplifting essay How Soil Microbes Affect the Environment | Quanta Magazine which is a much better beginning than the boring things I might write. Still might
Microbes in soils, being constantly engaged in chemical warfare, have been sources of many antibiotic medicines.There is no indication that we have tapped out these sources. Nematodes in soils may be the most numerous animals on earth in terms of individuals (OK, somebody has to be, but it turns out to be micro-lampreys). Total soil carbon storage is 3 or more times as much as in the atmosphere. Depends on who's estimate you prefer for the former. I reckon we still don't know how much because some very deep soils remain to be sampled. Old tropical oxisols and ultisols (yay! more words!) can be more than 20 meters deep and remain undersampled. So, this soil/atmosphere ratio could be 5 or 6. It has not been a hotspot for earth-science research funding. If you want to know how poorly soils are understood, you need only read about 'Biosphere 2'. We may need a thread here on that thing...
Bob, this question has a lot of hidden complexity. You could say that soils on land are always moving downslope (if there is a slope), although rates vary from 'about zero' to 'landslide'. So the top of a slope would be an erosion surface and the bottom, a deposition surface. Marine muds are I suppose purely deposition surfaces. In river channels, they are both. Soils, as such are just passing through. That gets you a fraction of the way through soil physics. After that, chemistry and biology.
National Geographic offers a bit more: Do We Treat Our Soil Like Dirt? | The Plate I know this topic is not a favorite here, but would just like to say it's pretty amazing how much soils have apparently degraded since global agriculture. Still churning out the food &fiber though, and that is going to need to ramp up a bit over the coming few decades.
nice article. the confliction comes from the fact that we expect to live 'better' than our parents, because that was how we were raised. but that 'better' comes at a cost. we can raise organic crops, use natural fertilizer and compost our soils, conserve water and etc,, but not many are willing to pay the price. that would involve sacrificing modern luxuries such as the automobile, vacation home, cell phone, mcmansion and so forth. like everything else, it will take a crisis for any change to come about.
Both Science and Nature in their most recent weekly issues have articles about the Unified Microbiome Initiative Consortium. So, what is that thing? As you know, now tiny amounts of DNA (or RNA) can be amplified and their sequences determined. Libraries are being built and expanded to indicate that a particular sequence comes from a particular species (or some higher taxonomic group). A microbiome is all of the species of to-small-to-see critters that live in one place. So, now that the sequencing has dropped a lot in cost, we are to sample, well, everywhere and figure it all out. This pertains to soils as they possess microbiomes that remain mostly unknown, and likely to affect agricultural productivity, forest carbon sequestration, and other dandy things. I was just at a soils meeting, where there was general agreement that naming all the microbes was not really the most important thing (actually I am toning that down a bit). Rather, we should be figuring out what the microbes do. This is actually much more difficult.
