Present at our Goldschmidt2020 Session!

Hi all! New blog up and running!

I'd like to advertise for our session at the Goldschmidt2020 Geochemistry Conference in Honolulu in June 2020. We are hosting a really unique and timely session titled "Subaqueous Soils or Sediments? The Intersection of Pedology and Sediment Geochemistry".  We have noticed a lot of unrealized overlap (but also duplication of efforts) between soil scientists and the marine sediment geochemistry communities. In hoping to bring these potential synergies to light, I've teamed up with Dr. Todd Osborne at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience at the University of Florida to host this unique session. Please consider submitting an abstract (Session 10k) by 11:59 pm on Valentine's Day, February 14, 2020. Consider this a way out of your other official duties!!  :)

Our colleague Dr. Rex Ellis of the St. John's River Water Management District, a real driving force of the sub-aqueous soil science movement, oversees the processing of a submerged core at a subs-aqueous soil mapping workshop at the UF Whitney Lab in Fall of 2020.

Subaqueous Soils or Sediments? The Intersection of Pedology and Sediment Geochemistry

The advent of modern soil science almost a century ago brought with it a focus on characterizing soil ecosystem services. Pedologists have recently expanded efforts to characterize submerged soils due to their importance in governing ecosystem health. Limnologists and oceanographers, however, have studied near-surface coastal sediment diagenetic processes for decades. Despite different toolkits and vocabularies, both communities ultimately seek to protect human and ecosystem well-being. Pedologists have translated their traditional techniques of holistically classifying sediments over multi-meter depth scales and relating to landscape processes, while limnologists and oceanographers consider the solid phase and pore water composition to be predictable from the deposition of organic carbon and minerals and overlying water conditions. Limnologists and oceanographers typically focus on understanding fundamental chemical and biological processes that control carbon and nutrient budgets and fluxes over various time and space scales, often with a more applied focus such as climate or water quality. On the other hand, pedologists seek to develop “interpretations”of each subaqueous soil type, for example: blue carbon storage, benthic habitat suitability, potential environmental effects from dredging (e.g. sulfidization and acidification), or potential marine architecture corrosion. We invite members of either community to present new tools to characterize these environments (i.e. sampling/analyses, data treatment/processing, modeling or characterization), new geochemical or biological results from coastal, estuarine, or freshwater submerged or wetland environments that showcase these tools, or any big-picture perspectives that may foster open dialogue and more fluid collaborations between our communities in the future.