I understand what water and air are composed of and I more or less understand how fire works. But what is soil? If you put your hands in your garden, you will take out very heterogenous stuff, you will get some twigs and bugs which of course are organic matter, but what’s the general brown stuff? Is it organic? Were does it come from and how is it produced? Also collateral question, if earth is organic matter, when the first living organisms came out of the ocean, which were plants, how did they find nutrients?
In: Planetary Science
It has two main components.
Organic matter which is mostly fairly stable carbon compounds like cellulose and lignin.
Inorganic matter which is mostly oxides and carbonates of various things like silica, aluminium, calcium in the form of sand and pebbles.
It also generally contains some amount of air and/or water, as well as trace minerals dissolved into the water it contains.
And a decent portion of the mass of soil is biomass of microbes living in it.
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