Dust Travelled Thousands of Miles to Enrich Hawaiian Soils
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
Dust travelled thousands of miles to enrich Hawaiian soils:
In a recent paper published in Geoderma, European researchers outline how they used the rich soils of Hawaii to study the critical movement of phosphorous through the environment.
[...] The project was led by Agroscope scientist Dr. Julian Helfenstein, Prof. Emmanuel Frossard with the Institute of Agricultural Sciences, ETH Zurich; and Dr. Christian Vogel, a researcher at the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing in Berlin.
[...] Phosphorus generally comes from apatite found in the bedrock, Helfenstein explained. So, the group was surprised to discover that some of the phosphorus in their weathered Hawaiian Hawaiian[sic] topsoil samples had originated from dust that was deposited by air currents. This dust, and the phosphorus contained within, traveled thousands of kilometers before settling on the island.
Researchers would expect to find apatite in soils in dry areas where it would not get washed away by rainfall. So, finding evidence of apatite in wet soils amazed the scientists.
"On the wet end of the gradient, these soils are extremely weathered so primary apatite was gone, but we still found these small grains of apatite in the soil co-located with quartz, suggesting that it's coming from somewhere else. It's not coming from the bottom, it's coming from the air," Helfenstein said.
Journal Reference:
Christian Vogel, et al. Microspectroscopy reveals dust-derived apatite grains in acidic, highly-weathered Hawaiian soils, Geoderma (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.geoderma.2020.114681
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