Pores are the sine qua non of soil. Soil without pores we call rock. Life enters the soil through the pores, and further it is sustained by them. Pores allow roots, plus other soil flora and fauna, to penetrate the soil. Pores act both as conduits for, and reservoirs of the necessities of life. Water infiltration and storage, gaseous entry and exhaust, plus chemical transport and exchange are all facilitated by the network of pores that in sum often accounts for about half of the soil's total volume.
Porosity
Soil is a three‐phase medium, comprising solid, liquid and gaseous volume fractions,
where V is the total volume of some representative elementary volume of soil (m 3), and the right‐hand side identifies the volumetric contributions of the solid, liquid and gaseous phases (m 3). If this element of soil has mass of solids m s (kg), then the bulk density ρ b is simply m s/V. When this soil is dry, V l = 0, so the mass m sis entirely due to the solid particles which are...
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Gupta, R.K. et al. (2008). Soil Pores. In: Chesworth, W. (eds) Encyclopedia of Soil Science. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-3995-9_548
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