Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

PEOPLE OF NOTE:

Desert soil: It’s a dirty job, but …

Head of hydrology division at DRI studies soil to help us plan our lives in the desert

0303People

Tiffany Brown

Michael Young, head of the hydrology division of the Desert Research Institute, studies desert soil with the help of three lysimeters — huge tanks dug into the ground near Boulder City and filled with 48,000 pounds of soil. Young’s research helps determine how water and gases move into and out of the soil.

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At the Desert Research Institute, Michael Young heads the largest university hydrology division in the country. Young himself proposed and led the design of what may be the world’s most advanced lysimeters, which measure water percolation through soil. The devices quite literally reveal the secrets of the earth — revealing data important for water policy, pollution cleanup, development planning and global warming models.

Also, he microwaves dirt.

There were important scientific reasons for this — he needed to figure out how much water was in the dirt, and one way to do that is to weigh the dirt, dry it out, weigh it again and subtract that number from the dirt’s original weight. Young wanted to dry the dirt out quickly, so he used a microwave oven.

Then, in his own words: “At seven minutes, the beaker was glowing white hot. ‘Oh my God,’ I thought, so I took it out with tongs and ran to the sink. And what was left in it was this little molten ball.

“I created lava, basically,” Young says.

After that, he decided it would be a good idea to read the microwave’s manual. Medium power, it turns out, is the trick.

What Young learned from microwaving dirt was important information for calibrating the Desert Research Institute’s three lysimeters outside of Boulder City, at the only American facility of its type researching desert soil.

The lysimeters are huge tanks dug into the ground, 10 feet tall and filled with 48,000 pounds of soil divided into 30 layers. The layers replicate the natural composition of the soil in the Eldorado Valley. Inside each lysimeter are 150 sensors. The data they collect allow scientists like Young to tell the story of how water and gases move into and out of the soil.

As it turns out, desert soil appears to be more useful than people think. For instance, it absorbs carbon dioxide, something people usually think of as the job of forests and oceans.

If you have dug in your back yard, you’ve encountered this carbon as caliche, a brutally hard, white deposit of calcium carbonate.

Another point about desert soil is that almost no rain that falls in the Las Vegas Valley makes it into the aquifer. In the wettest year on record, rainwater did not soak deeper into the earth than about three feet. All the water is used by plants or evaporates out. We are almost wholly dependent for our drinking water on snow that falls on the Rockies.

Young says he knows scientific research can often seem obscure and scientists often do not help by talking about their work in technical terms. But people need to know the results of research and not just because, as taxpayers, they are often paying for it. Soil research can seem arcane, but Young says what it tells us is a vital guide for how we plan our lives in the desert.

“The fact of the matter is that in 30 years, your children will inherit this planet, and they’ll need to know how it works,” Young says.

“And so do we.”

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