Soil Pit Sampling

We took our first soil samples from the site to do our initial site characterization. We first cleared a face within the soil pit at the bottom of the site. Then we took a soil core every 10cm from the surface of the soil down to the bottom of the soil pit. This resulted in 14 cores from the profile of the soil pit. These core will be analyzed for carbon, nitrogen, and iron and aluminum.

Figure 1: The soil pit at the Lyon Arboretum with soil core taken every 10cm.

The carbon and nitrogen will be analyzed in a machine called an Elemental Analyzer (EA) after they are are ground to a finer grain and weighed using a micro-balance to be put in the machine. The iron and aluminum will be analyzed using a machine called a Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) machine. The samples first are processed through three different extraction methods that help to extract iron and aluminium from the soil sample. Each method extracts different types of iron and aluminum from the sample and that is why we use three different extraction tests. The results of these test will help us to determine in part how much carbon, nitrogen, iron and aluminum are existing in the sample prior to the heating experiment manipulation installment.

Figure 2: Casey taking the soil sample from the profile of the soil pit, using a coring tool and collecting the sample for later processing