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Thanks! I was looking for that kind of answers! So does that mean that at any given place, there won't be soil for deeper than the roots go? What happens to th

• ShlomoS 7y ago
  >So does that mean that at any given place, there won't be soil for deeper than the roots go? In general yes. The exception being where there were roots and someone recently killed all the plants, it takes a while for the soil to die. Also some plants have roots that are just for water, usually taproots, and those can go much deeper than the soil since they don't care about microbes or nutrients, just water. >What happens to the soul if all the roots die or are removed (assuming it is not washed away by water)? Does it decay into CO2? Yep. This is how plowing and tilling has destroyed so much top soil. Much of the Americas had several feet of rich, dark topsoil in the 1700s, which we proceeded to plow every year, leaving it bare for months so that the microbes had nothing feeding them, so the exudate feeders start dying, the decomposers decompose their "corpses" and the soil loses a bunch of carbon to the atmosphere as CO2. Over years of conventional farming, you eventually end up losing all the soil and you're left with just dirt, which you now need to add soluble fertilizer to in order to grow a crop.
• netjiro 7y ago
  Different plants have different behaviours. Some sequester carbon well in the ground, others have near zero long term sequestration value. Some of the best are algae and seaweed that are allowed to sink to the bottom when they die. Plants that grow in bogs behave similarly. Chestnut is one of the best long term carbon sequestering trees.