Parent Material
The rock from which soil is formed is called parent material. The main types are: aeolian, glacial till, glacial outwash, alluvium, lacustrine parent material and residual parent material, or bedrock.
Pedologists use the following generic functional relationship for understanding soil formation:
s = f (cl, o, r, p, t, ...)
where s - soil properties; cl - regional climate; o - potential biota; r - topography; p - parent material; t - time; ... - additional variables.
Read more about this topic: Pedogenesis
Famous quotes containing the words parent and/or material:
“I think that parents ought to get some idea of how the so- called “experts” have changed their advice over the decades, so that they won’t take them deadly seriously, and so that if the parent has the strong feeling, “I don’t like this advice,” the parent won’t feel compelled to follow it. . . . So don’t worry about trying to do a perfect job. There is no perfect job. There is no one way of raising your children.”
—Benjamin Spock (b. 1903)
“This is the essential distinction—even opposition—between the painting and the film: the painting is composed subjectively, the film objectively. However highly we rate the function of the scenario writer—in actual practice it is rated very low—we must recognize that the film is not transposed directly and freely from the mind by means of a docile medium like paint, but must be cut piece-meal out of the lumbering material of the actual visible world.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)