Basic Earth Science and Society - Basic Research Opportunities in Earth Science - page 10

The water most people use comes from groundwater, streams, and lakes;
regardless of its pathway, water quality is determined largely by the soils it
passes through.
Soil management is thus crucial to sustaining and improving the human
habitat, and issues related to land use, soil quality, degradation, and
contamination now figure prominently in most policy decisions germane to the
Critical Zone. The attributes of soil, coupled with climate variables, have
traditionally been used in agriculture to predict the potential and limitations of
land areas to produce food, feed, or fiber, but these same concepts are now being
applied to all types of ecosystems. Moreover, the application of high-input
farming, especially on marginally arable lands, has accentuated the
environmental problems related to soil erosion, soil degradation through
acidification, accumulation of toxic elements and salinization, and downstream
contamination of aquatic systems from agricultural runoff. In the United States,
precision agriculture with site-specific management is being practiced extensively
to counter detrimental effects, but much is yet to be learned.
Judicious soil management will require increasing investments in soil
science, including research on the fundamental physical, chemical, and biological
processes involved in soil development. This type of basic research fits very well
into the larger agenda of NSF-sponsored Earth science. As a geological process,
soil development demonstrates the power of weathering, which in turn is a key
process for issues as diverse as the availability of nutrients, the emission and
capture of greenhouse gases, the chemistry of the ocean, and the evolution and
longevity of landscapes. How water flows through soil and interacts chemically
with the pedosphere is fundamental to hydrology and climatology. Microbial
processes in soil are a primary topic for novel research in geobiology, and the
microscopic structure of soil is a new focus in the study of Earth materials. The
opportunities to connect the study of soils to other aspects of geoscience through
the basic research programs of EAR are therefore expanding.
Natural Hazards
The Critical Zone in which humans and many other biota live is a high-
energy, often dangerous, interface. Here the solar-powered processes in the
Earth's fluid envelope interact with the tectonic processes powered by heat
escaping from its deep interior. The atmosphere transports water from the oceans
to the continents, where irregular patterns of rainfall and evaporation combine
with the complex hydrological response of the land surface and its vegetation to
produce a chaotic sequence of flooding and drought. The planetary heat flux
drives plate tectonics and melts rock to form the magmas