Fascinating that a student in a Master's program is the first to document the natural rate of soil erosion in the Midwest. "For the first time, we know what th

Fascinating that a student in a Master's program is the first to document the natural rate of soil erosion in the Midwest. "For the first time, we know what the natural rates of erosion are in the Midwest,” says Caroline Quarrier, the paper’s lead author and who completed this research as part of her master’s thesis at UMass Amherst. “And because we now know the rate of erosion before Euro-American settlement, we can see exactly how much modern agriculture has accelerated the process.” The numbers are not encouraging. “Our median pre-agricultural erosion rate across all the sites we sampled is 0.04 mm per year,” says Larsen. Any modern-day erosion rate higher than that number means that soil is disappearing faster than it is accumulating."