Lab5 Environmental

Lab

1. What determines the texture of soil?

The proportion of sand, silt, and clay in a soil's composition determines its texture.

2. What is meant by the permeability of a soil? What is porosity and how is it related to permeability?

Porosity is the amount of empty space in a rock or other earth material (like sand) - in other words, it's how much water a material can hold. Permeability refers to how well water flows through a material - the flow is controlled by how large the pores are and how well connected the pores are in a given object.

Therefore, there these are two primary factors that limit the movement and the amount of water (or other fluids) retained in rocks/sedimentary materials.

3. Based on your experiment, which type of soil is the most permeable? Which is the least permeable? How do you know?

Sand is most permeable because it has least porosity of 26% as shown in the conducted experiment. While heavy clay shows most porosity of 58% and has least permeability.

4. Explain why surface runoff, or rain not absorbed by the soil, occurs much more often in areas with soils with high clay content.

Since high clay has least permeability because it is the soil with high porosity and have many small pores which can hold a lot of water though but may take longer for the water to enter all the pores and get absorbed. Heavy clay will slowly absorb water due to high porosity. Rain falls are rather quick in rate so heavy clay soil has less time left to absorb the rain water and it results in more runoff in places where the soil has high clay content.

5. Soil type and texture are very important to farmers. Too little water in the soil may cause plants to wilt and die. Too much water in the soil can disrupt a plant's ability to take in oxygen. Based on your data, which type of soil do you think is best for agriculture? Explain your answer.

Loam can be the best kind of soil to plant the crops because firstly it is...