Rain Falling on Mountains Speeds Soil Creation and CO2 Removal

U.S. scientists have measured the rate at which mountains make the raw material for molehills – and found that if the climate is rainy enough, soil gets made at an astonishing speed.  And in the course of this natural conversion of rock to fertile farmland and forest loam, carbon is naturally removed from the atmosphere.

On the ridge tops of the New Zealand mountains, soil was being manufactured by chemical weathering (which is scientific shorthand for rain splashing on rock) at the rate of up to 2.5 mm a year.

“A couple of millimeters a year sounds pretty slow to anyone but a geologist,” said David R. Montgomery, one of the study authors.  “Isaac measured two millimeters of soil production a year, so it would take just a dozen years to make an inch of soil.  That’s shockingly fast for a geologist, because the conventional wisdom is it takes centuries.”

Rain Falling on Mountains Speeds Soil Creation and CO2 Removal