You're listening to a glassbox media podcast.

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast, where I read random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.

I'm your host Benjamin Boster.

Today's episode is from a Wikipedia article titled Soil. Soil, also commonly

referred to as Earth or dirt, is a mixture of organic matter, minerals, gases, liquids, and organisms that together

support the life of plants and soil organisms.

Some scientific definitions distinguish dirt from soil by restricting the former terms specifically to displaced soil.

Soil consists of a solid phase of minerals and organic matter, the soil matrix,

as well as a porous phase that holds gases, the soil atmosphere, and water the soil solution.

Accordingly, soil is a three-state system of solids, liquids, and gases. Soil is a product of several factors. The influence of climate, relief, elevation, orientation, and slope of terrain, organisms, and the soil's parent materials,

original minerals, interacting over time.

It continually undergoes development

by way of numerous physical, chemical, and biological processes,

which include weathering with associated erosion.

Given its complexity and strong internal connectedness, soil ecologists regard soil as an ecosystem.

Most soils have a dry bulk density, density of a soil taking into account voids when dry between 1.1 and 1.6 grams per centimeter cubed, though the soil particle density is much higher in the range of 2.6 to 2.7 grams per

centimeter cubed. Little of the soil of planet Earth is older than the Pleistocene, and none is older than the Cenozoic,

although fossilized soils are preserved from as far back as the Arkean.

Collectively the Earth's body of soil is called the Petosphere.

The Petosphere interfaces with the lithosphere, the hydrososphere, the atmosphere, and the biosphere. Soil has four important functions. As a medium for plant growth,

as a means of water storage supply and purification, as a modifier of Earth's atmosphere, has a habitat for organisms.

All of these functions in their turn modify the soil and its properties.

...