Erosion

Natural Erosion and Soil Creation

In different soil gradients, a specific slow, organic and inorganic physical process of natural soil creation occurs that involves beneficial erosion. This process jockeys increasingly with a faster, human soil erosion and sheet runoff that kill plant and animal life within a soil gradient—carrying the slowly formed soil away. Thus anthropogenic soil erosion and associated biodiversity loss start in the alteration of this balance in the creation or destruction of soil and in how humans affect water dynamics.

Understanding soil creation chemically and physically is necessary if one wishes to understand and arrest the process of soil destruction. Soil creation results from a mixture of decayed organic and inorganic matter relationships, which create an all-important macro-molecular chelate arrangement of humic acids. Humic acids are a major component required for making humic substances, created via microbial degradation of once-living matter. A large number of humic molecules are hydrophobic, meaning they innately allow, in the presence of water, clumping into “water-avoiding” supramolecular nodes.

Only the acidic component of humic substances, mainly carboxylic acid, gives soil a capacity for chelation, a capacity to “store” inorganic minerals as ions without them having a strong chemical bond with anything else. Chelated inorganic ions are more readily bioavailable for plants or are sequestered away from them if they are poisons. Thus one of the most important properties of humic acid is this chelation ability to solubilize many ions into hydrophobic cations (water-avoiding, chemically positive ions). For bioavailability chelation, ions like magnesium, calcium, and iron are made available for plant absorption. For sequestering chelation, humic acid holds apart as ions many elements that otherwise would form toxic molecular salts to poison the soil without positive biological effect (like cadmium and lead). For instance, sodium and chlorine ions naturally want to combine to form a salt. Instead, in good fertile soil they are attached as separate ions to humic acids and clay—rendered harmless by chelation. Thus many good soils contain large quantities of safely chelated “salt,” held apart in ionic form from precipitating out in this way. Plant growth thrives in such “theoretically saline” soils, in many cases. In short, humic acid chelation capacities have an important dual role for living systems: They make biological uptake of nutrients possible, and they sequester poisons. Chemistry of varied humic acids has a profound influence on chelation capacities as well.

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