Orders of Soil

Do you know the 12 orders of soils?

If not, then today you will know about the orders of the soils.

There are 12 orders of soil, largely on the basis of soil properties that reflect a major course of development, with considerable emphasis placed on the presence or absence of major diagnostic horizons. Such as, soils having lot of organic matter can be characterized by histic epipedons or soil having volcanic ashes can be characterized by melanis epipedons.

The name of the 12 orders are described below:

• Entisols.  (Click here to know about it)  
• Inceptisols.
• Andisols.
• Histolsols.
• Gelisols.
• Vertisols.
• Aridisols.
• Mollisols.
• Alfisols.
• Spodosols.
• Ultisols.
• Oxisols.

Before i start describing them, closely look at this picture,

See, The first and foremost order is Entisols. It is new soil, weakly developed mineral soils.

Mild weathering can convert this Entisols to Inceptisols and mild weathering on volcanic ejecta can convert Entisols to Andisols.

On the other-hand, Permafrost can convert Entisols to Gelisols whereas deep accumulation of organic matter can convert Entisols to Histosols.

When Entisols is highly weathered and there is low activity of clays, Fe and Al oxides then it can be called Oxisols.

It is just a simple knowledge about the orders how the other orders came, where they came from, this picture makes us clear about that. 

In my next post, we will learn in details about 12 orders.

Reference

Brady, N.C., Weil, R.R. The nature and properties of soils. 13th edition.

SSSA. 1984. Soil Taxonomy, Achievements and Challenges. SSSA Special Publication no. 14.