Does every step count? Soil weathering edition, Vassar College

Weathering impacts everything, from minerals' chemistry to mountains and soil. Soils are a natural resource created from weathered materials, so analyzing them would tell us more about the chemical, physical, and at times biological process of weathering. Soils cover much of Earth's land surface, interacting with many biological creatures such as humans. Humans affect soil in many ways, one of which is with their footsteps, which results in changes like soil compaction. In this thesis, I characterized five types of Vassar soils with varied proximity to human foot and vehicle traffic. Based on previous descriptions of the soils, I assumed that all five types of soils have weathered similarly and that any differences are due to human activity. Soil grain size, organic carbon content and mineralogy were analyzed here at Vassar to investigate how they weathered, despite their differing locations. Interestingly, soils with low human foot traffic, but high vehicular human activity had a smaller grain size and a greater amount of organic carbon content in the soil. My results supported the assumption that the soil have similar parent bedrock and have weathered similarly, and the differences can be attributed to human activity.