UGA students help retrieve mesh bags for study of mineral weathering.

Perfect fall weather helped UGA students participate in long-term mineral weathering experiments led by Dr. Rebecca Lybrand at the University of California Davis (UCD). Specially designed mesh bags (looking like tea bags) filled with different rock types (granite, basalt, and quartz sandstone) have been deployed in the soil for several years.  This mid-November weekend Sierra Wermuth, Rita Dwivedi, and Taran Bradley assisted Ph.D. student Maddie Morris (UCD) in retrieving deployments from experimental sites in the Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory, South Carolina, and the J. Phil Campbell Sr. Research and Education Center, Georgia.  These studies use molecular biological, electron microscopy, and spectroscopic methods to help better understand the interactions between the soil microbial and fungal communities and the mineral assemblages. Such field-based observations help to constrain reaction-transport models that integrate with larger exogenic box models for the study of the cycling of elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and iron.

For more information see the following website and related publications:

Soil and pedology lab at the University of California, Davis: http://www.rebeccalybrand.com/

• Fungal hyphae develop where titanomagnetite inclusions reach the surface of basalt grains, Sci Rep 12, 3407. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-04157

• A coupled microscopy approach to assess the nano-landscape of weathering, Nature - Scientific Reports https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-41357-0