Holes

Jan, my professor, digging deep into the soil pit.

Do you remember Camp Green Lake? If not, you have not taken the time to read, "Holes," by Louis Sachar.  It's basically a story of a camp (Green Lake) where "bad" boys are sent to dig holes everything.  Obviously, there's a lot more to the story than what I just described, trust me.

Yesterday's field trip reminded me of Holes. Because we dug a lot of them!  Ok, I'll admit, I didn't actually contribute to any of the hole digging..*hides face*

My Soils of the World course took a field trip about 1 hr north near Tierp.  First of all, it was really cold, considering it's only September!  It was 10 degrees C, and even with my long johns, long sleeve, sweater, and rainjacket, I could have used a million more layers..

We've been learning the World Reference Base (WRB) classification system for soils, and this is the universal classification system.   With this handy book, you should be able to classify any soil that you come across in any part of the world!  Understandably, there are a lot of different soils, surface horizons, and diagnostic horizons - way  more than what I learned last year in the Canadian System of Soil Classification.  I can tell you right now that I'm not looking forward to the final exam in this course!   

Soon after, they got bored of the soil and went after my knapsack!

Back to the field.  The first hole we dug was at a seemingly random cattle farm, where the cattle provided the entertainment for us.  Or, I guess I could say they seemed pretty entertained by a bunch of students digging out soil and taking pictures of the hole.  The soil here, as my professor told me, is specific to this region of Sweden.  It's called "gyttja" soil, and the cool part was when my prof took a very long instrument and stabbed it into the soil pit, resulting in the extraction of all of the soil layers, all the way down to the loess (basically the bottom of the soil pit).  

Soil formed thousands and thousands of years ago!

If you take a look at the picture above, you will see dark and light bands.  The dark bands are thinner than the light bands, and these represent the soil formed during the winter months (during the winter months, water flows at a slower rate and thus carries lighter, more fine soil material).  And these soils were formed thousands and thousands of years ago.  As you look further to the left, the bands become thicker, and signify older soils (tens of thousands of years ago).  Cool, eh?

Forest near Tierp. Tons of lingonberries and wild blueberries on the floor.

So we did more soil profiling at other sites, which included a ploughed farm (phayozem soil) and a beautiful forest.

Funky-looking fungi.

There were also mushrooms, but most of them looked a bit sketchy..

A podzol soil

Scooping water out of the forest soil pit.

My prof, Jan Eriksson, was so into the soil pit digging!  He brought buckets so that we could look at the soil profile of a standing water pit, and got into the water to scoop out all of the water.  He told us this is his annual test for his rainboots' quality check ;)

It was a good day to go (we were lucky it didn't rain - who knew it rained as much as it does in Van?!) and I got to see a bunch of different soils.  And maybe you learned a little bit while reading this posting :)