Today at the Rose Scholar Cafe Dawit Solomon spoke to us about why soil matters. Although I haven’t given much thought to the role of soil before hearing Dr. Solomon discuss its significance, I realized right away how important it is to life on Earth. Dr. Solomon began by asking us what exactly is the dirt outside that we call soil? While we all had a general idea, we learned that soil has many different far-reaching roles. Some of these roles include as a foundation for society and the society’s structures, a source of resources, an essential aspect in growing food and materials, a component of water regulation, and part of Earth’s climate regulation system, just to name a few.

I was surprised to learn that part of the increase in carbon dioxide gas in our atmosphere originations from the soil. More specifically, 25% of carbon dioxide emissions are from the soil, a percentage that is growing as soil is being disturbed more and more by humans. The quantity of carbon dioxide isn’t changing, however soil is going from the ground to the air – a significant problem. A solution to this issue would be to transfer the carbon back from the atmosphere to the soil, but how do we do this? Dr. Solomon is involved with studying soil at the nano level with many modern imaging tools. However, he pointed out that we still don’t understand how carbon is bound in soils. It seems as though gaining insight into the nature of carbon chemistry in soil would enable scientists to develop a method of putting more soil in the ground and perhaps slowing down the increase of soil in the atmosphere and thus climate change. It was very exciting to hear about all the different methods that Dr. Solomon and students at Cornell have used to research soil, including but not limited to nano-level spectrometry instruments. Hopefully the knowledge that they have uncovered will contribute to the “soil solution”!