Soils in Extreme Environments

Abstract

Extreme environments limit life. Extreme environments are generally limited by moisture and temperature and include both hot deserts such as the Sahara and cold deserts such as the Dry Valleys of Antarctica. Geothermal activity creates extreme environments of heat and acidity or alkalinity that challenges survival for all but a few specially adapted organisms. Hostile environments are not the place for productive agriculture but their raw beauty is inescapable, and there are fascinating lessons to learn when you can watch soil processes stripped of the impacts of much of the life that marks other environments. The soils that form in extreme environments are surprisingly diverse. They develop in a wide variety of parent materials, ranging from solid rock, exposed by erosion in high mountains, to acid infused clays in geothermal environments. Over time, mineral rock materials weather to form soils, even in the most inhospitable environments. In extreme environments humans are only brief visitors as we cannot survive the excessive heat or cold without recourse to food and materials from other, more inhabitable, environments. However, specially adapted organisms, from thermophilic (heat loving) microbes in geothermal areas to penguins in Antarctica are intriguing inhabitants of our extreme environments.

The landscape of Victoria Valley in the McMurdo “Dry Valleys” of Antarctica is a cold desert where soils contain ice-cemented permafrost and patterned ground is evident at the surface. The Victoria Glacier is visible in the distance