Some places have rich, loamy, fertile soil that can grow almost anything; some places have hard, clay-filled dirt that roots have to struggle to break through; some places have barely any dirt and are mostly exposed rock. What drives this difference? Is it possible to look at a place’s geography and predict its soil type?
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Like the saying goes: “on a geological scale, everything you care about will happen quite quickly.”
If you view soil types as the product of *thousands upon thousands of years* of process and progress, it’s much more clear to see why certain areas have certain types of soils. Glaciers, lake beds, the tops and bottoms of mountains. Water washes things downhill, so higher areas tend to be more rocky. Forests continuously generate new debris for soil. Clay soils are interesting, there’s (broad terms here) a bit of a cycle of clay soils resisting the drainage of water, so you get lakes, and then lakes generate silt, which yields new clay, and then the whole thing dries up when the water that caused the lake finds someplace else to go and the climate changes.
And there are plenty of other factors, but the key takeaway is: over the last hundred hundred thousand years, how water behaved in an area is a good indicator of what type of soil the area will have. Again, broad terms, but that’s the gist of it.
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