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in New England (and other places I assume), rocks are light enough to float. There are many rocks under the surface of the soil, and over time they work their

in New England (and other places I assume), rocks are light enough to float. There are many rocks under the surface of the soil, and over time they work their way upward and pop out of the ground. Every spring when the fields are being tilled for planting, these rocks get in the way and they need to be removed (for the convenience of the farmer and his plow). Today's New England forests are all 2nd or 3rd growth; the land was previously completely cleared for farmland, before the farmland of the Great Plains opened up and was found more efficient for scale farming (and not least because the human population there was smaller). If you walk through the New England woods today, you will periodically/frequently come across old "abandoned" stone walls among the trees. Farmers built these stone walls to mark their property from the stones that were handy because they were removed from their nearby fields, where these stones had "floated" to the surface. The reason these stones are under the surface is because the grinding and bulldozing of glaciation, and then the subsequent outwashing of ice-melt carrying stones and sediment. All of that (from memory, apologies for any mistakes) to ask: won't adding crushed rocks to farmland result in a lot of those rocks popping back out of the ground? Will plowing just keep them turned under, but even so, wouldn't the population of rocks keep increasing?

lucb1e 3y ago
> these rocks get in the way and they need to be removed [...] you will periodically/frequently come across old "abandoned" stone walls [made] from the stones that were handy because they were removed from their nearby fields You didn't mention what size these rocks/stones are (to my non-native ears, a rock is at least several centimetres), but if you can build walls from them, I take it they're not sand-sized. If you click the link in the first paragraph of the article, leading to the source, it mentions in the introduction > Crushed metabasalt and olivine soil amendments were used to investigate changes in soil pore water alkalinity as a proxy for bicarbonate production. The metabasalt (median grain size: 102 ± 22 μm) was selected because of its benign elemental composition and modest weathering potential (the parent volcanics includes felsic facies, yielding an overall silica content in the intermediate-to-felsic range). The olivine (median grain size: 83 ± 12 μm), in contrast, was chosen for its potential to weather rapidly TL;DR the remains of the crushed rock they tested is measured in micrometers
- fsckboy 3y ago
  ooooh, micrometers. I was thinking pebble sized. I wouldn't call it crushed, it's pulverized powder (polvare which is powder in Italian, you see it in reference to minerals in wine vineyards)

lucb1e 3y ago

> these rocks get in the way and they need to be removed [...] you will periodically/frequently come across old "abandoned" stone walls [made] from the stones that were handy because they were removed from their nearby fields You didn't mention what size these rocks/stones are (to my non-native ears, a rock is at least several centimetres), but if you can build walls from them, I take it they're not sand-sized. If you click the link in the first paragraph of the article, leading to the source, it mentions in the introduction > Crushed metabasalt and olivine soil amendments were used to investigate changes in soil pore water alkalinity as a proxy for bicarbonate production. The metabasalt (median grain size: 102 ± 22 μm) was selected because of its benign elemental composition and modest weathering potential (the parent volcanics includes felsic facies, yielding an overall silica content in the intermediate-to-felsic range). The olivine (median grain size: 83 ± 12 μm), in contrast, was chosen for its potential to weather rapidly TL;DR the remains of the crushed rock they tested is measured in micrometers

fsckboy 3y ago
ooooh, micrometers. I was thinking pebble sized. I wouldn't call it crushed, it's pulverized powder (polvare which is powder in Italian, you see it in reference to minerals in wine vineyards)