The original school dining hall burnt down in the 1920s. The replacement, the current dining hall, was designed by Sir Hubert Worthington.A Tour of Rossall - Peter Bennett - (Rossall Archives) p.6 The design was not without fault however - it was constructed from bricks encased in a weatherable coating that would dissolve away to leave it looking in the same condition as the rest of the square.
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The main processes of soil formation of oxisols are weathering, humification and pedoturbation due to animals. These processes produce the characteristic soil profile. They are defined as soils containing at all depths no more than ten percent weatherable minerals, and low cation exchange capacity. Oxisols are always a red or yellowish color, due to the high concentration of iron(III) and aluminium oxides and hydroxides.
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Classified as coarse-silty, mixed, superactive, thermic typic eutrudepts: Natchez soils are in the Inceptisols soil order. Inceptisols soils have developed in relatively young material that have an Ochric epipedon is rich in weatherable minerals. The term coarse-silty indicates that the subsoil has less than 18 percent clay with less than 15 percent sand coarser than very fine. The term mixed suggests that no one mineral is over 60 percent.
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In USDA soil taxonomy, orthents are defined as entisols that lack horizon development due to either steep slopes or parent materials that contain no permanent weatherable minerals (such as ironstone). Typically, Orthents are exceedingly shallow soils. They are often referred to as skeletal soils or, in the FAO soil classification, as lithosols. The basic requirement for recognition of an orthent is that any former soil has been either completely removed or so truncated that the diagnostic horizons typical of all orders other than entisols are absent.
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On parent materials richer in weatherable minerals acidification occurs when basic cations are leached from the soil profile by rainfall or exported by the harvesting of forest or agricultural crops. Soil acidification is accelerated by the use of acid-forming nitrogenous fertilizers and by the effects of acid precipitation. Deforestation is another cause of soil acidification, mediated by increased leaching of soil nutrients in the absence of tree canopies. Soil contamination at low levels is often within a soil's capacity to treat and assimilate waste material.
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Ultisols, commonly known as red clay soils, are one of twelve soil orders in the United States Department of Agriculture soil taxonomy. The word "Ultisol" is derived from "ultimate", because Ultisols were seen as the ultimate product of continuous weathering of minerals in a humid, temperate climate without new soil formation via glaciation. They are defined as mineral soils which contain no calcareous (calcium carbonate containing) material anywhere within the soil, have less than 10% weatherable minerals in the extreme top layer of soil, and have less than 35% base saturation throughout the soil. Ultisols occur in humid temperate or tropical regions.
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X-ray diffraction view of Martian soil - CheMin analysis reveals feldspar, pyroxenes, olivine and more (Curiosity rover at "Rocknest", October 17, 2012). It is believed that large quantities of water and carbon dioxide ices remain frozen within the regolith in the equatorial parts of Mars and on its surface at higher latitudes. According to the High Energy Neutron Detector of the Mars Odyssey satellite the water content of Martian regolith is up to 5% by weight. The presence of olivine, which is an easily weatherable primary mineral, has been interpreted to mean that physical rather than chemical weathering processes currently dominate on Mars.
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Most orthents are found in very steep, mountainous regions where erodible material is so rapidly removed by erosion that a permanent covering of deep soil cannot establish itself. Such conditions occur in almost all regions of the world where steep slopes are prevalent. In Australia and a few regions of Africa, orthents occur in flat terrain because the parent rock contains absolutely no weatherable minerals except short-lived additions from rainfall, so that there is no breaking down of the minerals (chiefly iron oxides) in the rock. The steepness of most orthents causes the flora on them to be sparse shrubs or grassland.
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The first, histosols, emerged in the Devonian but are rare as fossils because most of their mass consists of organic materials that tend to decay quickly. Alfisols and ultisols emerged in the late Devonian and early Carboniferous, and have a continuous, though not rich, fossil record in eras since then. Spodosols are known only from the Carboniferous and from a few periods since that time - though less acidic soils otherwise similar to spodosols are known from the Mesozoic and Tertiary and may constitute an extinct suborder. During the Mesozoic the paleopedological record tends to be poor, probably because the absence of mountain-building and glaciation meant that most surface soils were very old and were constantly being weathered of what weatherable materials remained.
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