Prof. Allen G. Hunt from the Department of Physics, Wright State University is a guest of SFB 1313. During his stay at the University of Stuttgart he will give a talk in the SFB 1313 lecture series with the title:
Soil formation from percolation concepts as related to chemical weathering
Abstract: Chemical weathering rates in situ turn out to be mostly transport-limited. Non-Gaussian transport theory from percolation theory generates the observed dependences of chemical weathering on time, column length (or soil depth) and flow rates. Using the time integral of the chemical weathering rate (less any erosion) as a proxy for the soil depth allows a quantitative prediction of soil depth as a function of time. The predictions require as input parameters erosion rate, the median particle size, and the vertical rate of water infiltration. Markus Egli and I have tested this hypothesis on almost two hundred soil sites, using local information regarding all the parameters, and have found the results in fairly good agreement with measured soil depths. Most of the discrepancies are attributed to the difficulty in estimating the infiltration rate.