Soil Formation in The Active Layer
Cryoturbation is the dominant force operating in the active layer, and tends to make it generally uniform in composition throughout. However, variation in the composition of soils due to differences in parent rock are very marked in permafrost regions due to the low rate of weathering in the very cold climate.
The slow rate of decomposition of organic material means Gelisols (permafrost soils) are very important as a sink for carbon dioxide. This carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (chiefly methane) forms from the very slow decomposition of the excess organic matter that remains in most Gelisols and is mixed down into the pereletok layer during relatively hot summers and below that layer during warmer periods about 5000 to 6000 years ago. This storage of carbon means thawing of permafrost may accelerate global warming - some suggest the difference could become very significant especially if the carbon has been stored since before recent glacial maxima.
Read more about this topic: Active Layer
Famous quotes containing the words soil, formation, active and/or layer:
“Forever float that standard sheet!
Where breathes the foe but falls before us,
With Freedom’s soil beneath our feet,
And Freedom’s banner streaming o’er us!”
—Joseph Rodman Drake (1795–1820)
“It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organisation upon the natural organisation of the body.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)
“He crafted his writing and loved listening to those tiny explosions when the active brutality of verbs in revolution raced into sweet established nouns to send marching across the page a newly commissioned army of words-on-maneuvers, all decorated in loops, frets, and arrowlike flourishes.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“After a few months’ acquaintance with European “coffee,” one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)