Geoderma 192 (2013) 378379

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Geoderma
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoderma

Short communication

An updated, expanded, universal denition of soil

Giacomo Certini , Fiorenzo C. Ugolini
Dipartimento di Scienze delle Produzioni Agroalimentari e dell'Ambiente (DISPAA), Universit degli Studi di Firenze, Piazzale delle Cascine 28, 50144 Firenze, Italy

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 27 April 2012
Received in revised form 12 June 2012
Accepted 12 July 2012
Available online 17 November 2012
Keywords:
Denition of soil
Weathering
Extraterrestrial soils
Soil genesis
Regolith

Many natural things lack a universally accepted denition. Soil is

one of them. One of the reasons is its multifunctionality. Actually, land
use conditioned the way soil was perceived. Hence, for example,
farmers got a different view of soil relative to builders. Historically,
the prevailing concept of soil was that of agronomists a medium for
plant growth while for geologists soil was just a rather short phase
in the long global cycle of rocks, and for engineers an unconsolidated
earthy material that can be moved by machinery. It was in the late
1880s that the Russian Vasilij V. Dokuchaev, the father of pedology,
from the Greek pedon soil and logos knowledge, gave dignity to
soil as something with its own identity in the realm of natural objects.
Dokuchaev, in fact, proposed a naturalistic concept of soil that prescinds
from soil use. Essentially, he referred to the soil as a tridimensional entity located at earth's surface with morphology and unique physical,
chemical and biological properties acquired by the interaction, through
time, among living and dead organisms, rock, and climate on a given
topographic position. In this view, soil was not considered only as a
weathered porous phase of bedrock from which plants take water and
nutrients and to which they release their mortal remains. A couple of
decades after, the German Emil Ramann, simply interpreted soil as the
upper weathering layer of the solid earth crust (Ramann, 1911), hence
without particularly caring about soil functions. Later, the Russian
Jacob S. Joffe, who became in the United States the strongest advocate
of Dokuchaev outside Russia, dened soil a natural body, differentiated
into horizons of mineral and organic constituents, usually unconsolidated,
of variable depth, which differs from the parent material below in morphology, physical properties and constitution, chemical properties and
Corresponding author. Tel.: +39 055 3288321.
E-mail address: certini@uni.it (G. Certini).
0016-7061/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.geoderma.2012.07.008

composition, and biological characteristics (Joffe, 1936). Therefore, Joffe,

as well, did not require soil to sustain plant growth. Constantin C.
Nikiforoff, another Russian naturalized American, advanced at the end
of the 1950s that soil might be dened as the excited skin of the subaerial
part of the earth's crust, whose excitation is caused by the continuous
impinging of energy from both Outer Space and the decay of radioactive
elements inside the crust (Nikiforoff, 1959). In spite of a few exceptions,
the presence of life or the ability of supporting it was very often considered an essential feature of soil, and even now it is more or less expressly required by several denitions. The USDA Soil Taxonomy, which is
recognized in North America and in many other places as the standard
reference on pedology, denes soil a natural body comprised of solids
(minerals and organic matter), liquid, and gases that occurs on the land
surface, occupies space, and is characterized by one or both of the following: i) horizons, or layers, that are distinguishable from the initial material
as a result of additions, losses, transfers, and transformations of energy and
matter or ii) the ability to support rooted plants in a natural environment
(Soil Survey Staff, 2010). This denition, however, clearly illustrates
that while soil may grow plants, it does not need plants or processes
driven by plants to be soil. Actually, the Soil Taxonomy expanded its
1975 denition to include soils of the ice-free areas of Antarctica
where pedogenesis occurs, but the climate is too harsh to support
plants. This conrms that each denition of soil can be adapted to embrace loose materials that earlier failed to deserve the status of soils because are missing some orthodox features.
Today, after the landscape of our planet has been largely investigated and the new frontier of human exploration is Outer Space, an obvious question is: Can the loose surfaces of the other rocky bodies of our
Solar System and beyond be considered real soils? Until space inquiry
did not provide detailed information on the intimate nature of such surfaces, they were indifferently called regolith, from the Greek rhegos
blanket and lithos rock, a term that is used to indicate a generical
layer of loose, heterogeneous material covering solid rock.
The year before the lunar touchdown, Donald L. Johnson biased the
authors who used the term lunar soil and borrowed earth-conceived
terms for soil when the surcial layer of the Moon was still little
known (Johnson, 1968). He proposed the term epilith, from the Greek
epi upon, near to, in place of regolith. Now, more than forty years
later, the direct knowledge accumulated of our moon and Mars is honestly enough for deciding if their loose skin is soil or something else.
Space scientists do not care much about the ultimate nature of soil
and use indifferently soil and regolith to refer to the loose extraterrestrial surfaces. In some papers focused on the investigation of Mars
performed by the rovers Opportunity and Spirit, for example, it is significantly reported: The term soil is used here to denote any loose, unconsolidated materials that can be distinguished from rocks, bedrock, or

G. Certini, F.C. Ugolini / Geoderma 192 (2013) 378379

strongly cohesive sediments. No implication for the presence or absence of

organic materials or living matter is intended (Soderblom et al., 2004;
Squyres et al., 2004a, 2004b). However, just the ongoing accurate investigation of Mars is providing so much information that soil scientists are
called to close the long, annoying debate on the pedological nature of
the planet's skin; possibly coining an updated denition of soil to recognize Martian terrains as true soils. On Mars, there are increasing evidences of the current occurrence of water-mediated cryogenic
processes similar to those forming the patterned ground on Earth
(Baker, 2001; Smith et al., 2009; Soare et al., 2008) and past in situ aqueous alteration (Amundson et al., 2008; Banin, 2005; Haskin et al., 2005).
The surface of Mars and a few other near solid celestial bodies were
assessed or condently supposed to have experienced and being
experiencing also the action of several nonwater-mediated weathering
processes, partly different to those on Earth, such as physical reworking
by meteorite bombardment, deposition and chemical interactions of
impact-generated and sputtered ions, and impact by solar wind and
cosmic rays (Certini et al., 2009; Hapke, 2001; Retallack, 2001). They
are thus weathered surfaces, indeed. Is this enough for deserving
them the rank of soils? Yes, it is if we refer to the one-century old
Ramann's denition of soil. Even more supportive in this regard is the
much more recent cosmic denition of soil provided by the
above-cited Johnson: Soil is organic or lithic material at the surface of
planets and similar bodies altered by biological, chemical, and/or physical
agents (Johnson, 1998). We substantially advocate this denition.
Nonetheless, it suffers of some minor aws. One of them is the lack of
any specication to the necessary preponderant unconsolidated nature
of the material: a coherent rock, altered as it may be, is not a soil at all.
On the other hand, a pile of stones or wood is not a soil whether it is not
intermixed with a matrix of nes. Moreover, any blanket, to be soil,
must have a substantial thickness, and not to be just a coating. Finally,
we feel that the essence of soil formation is the change in composition
relative to the parent material, hence the chemical weathering, induced
or not by biological processes. On the contrary, the occurrence of physical weathering should be neither sufcient per se nor required to render soil a loose mantle, although it undeniably favors pedogenesis by
increasing the potentially (bio)chemically alterable surface area. The
chemically weathered stuff that is soil may lay underground rather

379

than to be exposed, such as in the cases of buried or submerged soils

on Earth. Hence, we propose that soil is a centimetric or thicker unconsolidated layer of ne-grained mineral and/or organic material, with or without coarse elements and cemented portions, lying at or near the surface of
planets, moons, and asteroids, which shows clear evidence of chemical
weathering. We think that this denition of soil could have a universal
value and represent, therefore, a simple reliable term for any terrigenous
Outer Space landmass.
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