‘Jarring’ discovery at the University of Illinois
A few years ago, University of Illinois assistant professor Andrew Margenot was told an old barn on the university’s farming campus was going to be torn down, and in it were some soil samples. Margenot says he found about eight thousand of jars of dirt, samples taken from all over Illinois going back to 1862. Margenot knew it was a unique, physical timeline into how Illinois soils have changed from the days when it truly was the “prairie” state. In the audio clip below, Margenot tells WGN’s Steve Alexander that most soil collections worldwide go back only 40 years, not 161 years. He says he and his team of researchers have been moving the collection into a building on campus, cataloguing them, and preparing for the next step: re-sampling. Margenot is hoping current Illinois landowners will take a look at the interactive map and, if their land was sampled way back when, allow U of I researchers to re-sample it and measure fertility, biodiversity and organic carbon, and help researchers answer larger questions about erosion, sustainable farming and even climate change.
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