Well maybe not technically.  I’m not entirely sure.  While Dr. Solomon explained the distinction (or lack thereof) between the two at the beginning of his slides, I can’t quite remember what that was.  But this bit of terminology wasn’t the important part–the thrust of his talk was that the soil that we walk on every day has a much more important place in our world than one might expect.

For me, the most interesting component of Dr. Solomon’s talk was how important a role soil can play in the management of climate change.  It never occurred to me that soil has the ability to store carbon.  As a physics person, I hear a good bit about how science can impact climate change problems.  But normally the people I hear talking about this are engineers in the like, those using applied principals to create new ways of addressing the root causes.  I never realized that one of the potentially best solutions is one that the Earth already has in place in storing carbon in the soil.  I look forward to learning more about how this field can be part of the solution.