Today was a good day and a bad day..

We had our first field trip for my Global Soil Geography Class. it was super awesome because they have some AMAZING Spodosols here, but at the same time it sucked.. It was really really cold and I got recruited by the Foresters into their group.. which was fine and dandy but then they found out that I"m a soil scientist. thats when I ended up doing all of th soil classification by myself. We had A LOT of rocks, all which were granite, in our site so it took us a long time to even get a few horizons.. but then I started picking them out and found that in the 55cm we had of a profile, we had 8 soil horizons. EIGHT! of course where we were at we had very shallow soils. but still thats a lot for only 55cm. But we also had a lot of activity going on in our profile.. I will post pictures as I get them from a group member. but our group ended up with a beautiful Haplorthods. It was a spodosols but Graeme wanted me to go a step further and get a better name than a spodosols because I am as he put it "fluent with the USDA handbook", he's funny. Anyhow, it went really well except that because it took us so long to dig, I didn't have time to texture so I could only guess at some of our horizons. We ended up with a prfile that looked like this..

0-6cm Oi 10YR2/2

6-9cm Oe 10YR2/2 (the differnce was in the duff and litter)

9-14cm A1 10YR2/1

14-20cm A2 10YR2/2

20-28cm AE 10YR3/3

28-37cm E 7.5YR3/4

37-43cm Bs 10YR3/4

43-55cm Bhs 10YR4/4

55cm on CwR

so it was really intersting we had an inclusion in the 28-37cm area which was pretty awesome. We then looked at all the other groups soil pits and it was really interesting that in less than a square mile, there were so many different types of soils being displayed.. there were gleys and peats as well as cambics and spodic soils. When it came our turn to present I appologized to everyone saying that I did not have time to texture the soil.. but I guess (from what my goupmates told me) that you could tell by the looks on their faces, they had no clue what I was talking about when I was describing the soil. I know the teachers knew what I was talking about but maybe I "wowed" them with awesomeness. what I found was interesting is that the spodic soils in Scotland are different than the ones in Oregon but Graeme's spodosol reminded me of the ones I saw at the coast. I admit I was expecting to see very peaty soils. But on the contrary the soils on the whole were fairly drained except for those that were in gullies or in locations of the perched water table. Most of the soils exhibited sandy loams and silty loams but it was extremely interesting that there was little to no clay in the soils there.

Also a fun thing on the trip today is that Graeme made an example of me and the way I talk. This is the first time someone has had an issue with the way I talk. It wasn't a bad issue but he thought it was funny. He asked me what I call those squiggly things in the earth that eat soil and excrete it out the other end.. and I said Worms.. But when I say it, it always comes out more like "werms" than worms. so he made me stand there in front of the whole class for what must have been 5 minutes until I could say Worms properly in Scottish.. then he wrote WURRMS (the double r is rolled) on everything for the rest of the day. I am supossed to say it in proper scottish from now on.. hahahaha..

Advanced Pedology made me feel like the stupedest person alive.. Every week we are going to be answering one question.. this week the question was "What is a Soil?" well to make a long story short, I now have to create a definition of what a soil is and it has to be one that works and can't be argued. I also have to come up with a list of every parent material that I can think of.

but now it is time to say goodnight. I didn't get a whole heck of a lot of sleep last night or the night before so I need to make it up now.