Читать книгу Hydrogeology, Chemical Weathering, and Soil Formation - Allen Hunt - Страница 24

Soil may be viewed as a one‐dimensional, two‐dimensional, or three‐dimensional object. The soil profile concept, introduced to western soil scientists by Curtis F. Marbut in 1921 (see Tandarich et al., 2002; Brevik et al., 2016), is one dimensional, defining soil as the vertical cross‐section from the surface downward through all the soil horizons and into the parent material. It was adopted as the basic unit for soil survey. During the 1920s and first half of the 1930s, soil surveyors mapped the spatial distribution of soils and in doing so were assuredly aware that soils were part of landscapes, but they did not consider soil as a three‐dimensional functional landscape unit. Concepts of that nature appeared first with the two‐dimensional soil catena and later with the three‐dimensional soil landscape, both of which, along with the soil profile, were to lend themselves to a systems approach.