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AP®︎/College Environmental science
Course: AP®︎/College Environmental science > Unit 3
Lesson 2: Earth's soilSoil texture triangle
Practice identifying and comparing soil types based on their percentage of clay, silt, and sand.
Created by Khan Academy.
Want to join the conversation?
- how do you determine the percentage makeup of the soil? Do you send a sample to a lab?(3 votes)
- Talking about clay reminds me of when I lived in GA (I live in TN now).
Where I used to live, there was soil; but also HUGE patches of red clay scattered everywhere.(1 vote) - how many different types of soil are there on earth(1 vote)
- At, how are you determining the angle at which the line is drawn to the other side? Depending on that angle, when we triangulate the three lines, we could be in a completely different part of the interior of the triangle, thus giving us a different readout for what type of soil we have. Please let me know if I've missed something. Thanks! 3:26(1 vote)
- I'm unsure of the answer, but I am pretty sure that you are looking at this from a more geometric perspective than a geological perspective.(1 vote)
Video transcript
- [Narrator] Today, we're
going to talk about soil. And you've probably noticed that there are many
different kinds of soils. The soil near a beach looks and feels very different than the soil in a forest. And part of the reason for that difference is something called soil texture. Soil texture. So when soil is formed, different types of rock break down because of the wind and
the rain and the weather. And they become differently
sized particles. And the combination of these
differently sized particles creates soil texture. So these differently sized particles can be broken down into three groups. We have sand. We have silt. And we have clay. Sand is made up of the larger
and heavier particles of soil. Sand is around two millimeters. Two millimeters to 0.05 millimeters. Which is a 20th of a
millimeter in diameter. And if it feels very gritty to touch. Clay on the other hand is the
smallest particles of soil. It's around 0.002
millimeters and the smaller. That's a 500th of a millimeter. So really tiny. If you rubbed clay between your fingers, it would feel smooth, and you wouldn't be able to feel the individual particles of soil. And unlike sand, you can't
even see clay's particles with a naked eye. Most people are familiar with
sandy soils and clay soils, but silt is right in between. It's made of a particles between
the size of clay and sand. So, it's between 0.05 millimeters and 0.002 millimeters. So when you think of silt
imagine baking flour. It's powdery. Powdery. And it can be carried
easily by wind and water. But soil is more complicated than just these three soil types. If you grabbed a handful of
soil from outside your home, it would probably be a combination
of all three soil types, along with some organic material. A soil's unique texture, that is it's combination
of silt, sand, and clay, affects how plants will grow. And so gardeners often wanna
know about their soil textures. They know what kinds of
plants to grow in that area. This is where a helpful diagram called the soil texture triangle comes in. The soil texture triangle. The triangle allows us
to place any soil sample into one of 12 different
soil texture categories. The 12 different categories are broken up based on the percentage of silt, clay and sand in the soil. To see how this works, let's do an example. Let's say a gardener determined
that a soil was 30% sand, 40% silt, and 30% clay. So, how can we figure out
what kind of soil have? First, we need to pick a side
of the triangle to start with. I'll start with sand. We know we have 30% sand. So, we go along the side of the triangle, until we find that 30% mark, right here. We want to draw a line from this point, to the side of the triangle, that this arrow is pointing to. The arrow is pointing
towards the clay side. So we draw the line
from the 30% sand mark, through the triangle, to the clay side. Like this. And by drawing this line, we already know that our soil sample will fall into a category along this line. So, it could be so silt loam,
loam, clay loam, or clay. But to figure out exactly where it is, let's draw another line. Let's do silt. The soil has 40% silt. We'll draw our line through the triangle towards the sand side
because of this arrow. So again, we do the same thing. We go along the percent silt's line. We find the 40% mark. And we're gonna draw a line from 40% to the other side of the triangle. And you can see when we draw that line, these two lines intersect
at the clay loam point. But to double-check, let's draw a line from the 30% clay mark, to the other side of
the triangle, like this. As you can see, these three lines, all intersected at the same point, right here in clay loam. So we know that we have clay loam. Notice that the percentage
of clay, silt and sand, all add up to a total of 100%. We could have picked
any two of these lines, just two, to find our answer. We don't need to draw
three lines every time. Let's do another example. Let's say our gardener has another plot, with soil that contains 58% sand, 27% silt, and 15% clay. So, I'm gonna go along the
percent sand part and find 58%. So that's pretty close to 60. And I'm gonna draw a line from 58%, to the other side of the triangle. Sometimes the example question, doesn't give us round
numbers to work with. So when that's the case, I like to use a ruler or a straight edge, just to make sure that my
lines are in the correct spot. Next I'm gonna use the 15% clay. So I find the 15% clay mark, and we draw a line for 15% to
the other side of the triangle following the direction of
the lines within the triangle. And we can see that our two lines intersect at this point. So, we have sandy loam. The gardener has these two
plots clay loam and sandy loam. So when the gardener
looks at her two plots, she might wanna take into account the different kinds of soil. Certain kinds of plants do
better in clay loam soil while others would do better
in the sandy loam soil. This is partly because clay soils, hold onto moisture for
longer than sandy soils do. So the plants in the
gardeners sandy loam plot, would do better if they
had longer root systems to access water deeper in the ground. Or if they stored water inside
themselves to access later. The gardener could use a
gardening book or the internet to see what kinds of plants would do best in each of her two plots. Thanks for watching and
happy soil identification.