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The midwest has great soil because billions of organisms died millions of years ago in a shallow sea that covered most of the central united states today.
by Desertfoxatx 5y ago
The midwest has great soil because billions of organisms died millions of years ago in a shallow sea that covered most of the central united states today.
- dv_dt 5y agoI’m not sure that’s correct, or at least is not complete. There were many cycles of grasses and wildlife involved in building up the soil.
- eatmyshorts 5y agoNo, it's correct. The plains states are so fertile because of hundreds of millions of years of shallow ocean water led to huge amounts of plankton to die and settle. That's also why there's oil in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoI thought the soil was great because of the Yellowstone Caldera Supervolcano dropping huge amounts of volcanic ash every 650,000 years. How long has it been? Oh, right around 650,000 years..........
- Desertfoxatx 5y agoYou aren't wrong. All the life sustaining minerals/elements we have in the earths lithosphere are being renewed by volcanism. It is why the plant life was able to exist in the first place.
- Forge36 5y agoSimilar to "The Black Belt"? https://vigorousnorth.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-belt-how-soil-types-determined.html?m=1 https://vigorousnorth.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-belt-how-so... https://web.archive.org/web/20100526092708/http://www.southernspaces.org:80/contents/2004/tullos/4a.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20100526092708/http://www.southe...
- cjbgkagh 5y agoA theory I heard as a child was that glaciers pushed topsoil down from Canada during the ice ages? A superficial search did not turn up more info so maybe that has long been discredited and nobody told me.