What is soil made of and how does it form?
Dirt's Long Recipe
What is soil made of and how does it form?
Take a handful of dirt and you're holding one of the slowest, busiest recipes on Earth. It looks like brown nothing. It is actually a crowded, living mix that took centuries to bake. Let's pull it apart and see who's inside.
The recipe has four main ingredients. First, the broken-up bones of mountains — tiny grains of rock and mineral, the gritty part. Second, dead leaves and dead bugs, slowly rotting into a dark, spongy substance called humus. Then water in the gaps, and air in the gaps too. Yes — good soil is partly nothing at all, just pockets of breathing room.
