Moisture content Mineral matter – rocks are broken down to form soils, and sometimes these rocks give their colour to the soil.
Mineral matter - derived from the constituents of the parent material.
Ironically, photosynthesis is also behind many of the world’s fossil fuels, which formed from decayed prehistoric plants and animals.Soil Colour | Soil Particles | Bonding and Aggregation | Porosity | Changing Soil Structure | Soil Strengthįour main factors influence the colour of a soil: This process of taking carbon from the air and using it to make large polymers makes plants an extremely useful ally in combating climate change, which is predominantly caused by carbon dioxide emissions. Plants use the sugars they make to fuel their growth and combine them into more complex molecules like cellulose to make material. When the sun’s rays hit plants, they absorb these colours but not green, which gets reflected, giving most plants their distinctive hue. Plants can harvest light because their chloroplasts are stuffed full of a pigment called chlorophyll, which absorbs red and blue light. Chloroplasts, like the mitochondria in our own cells that drive our metabolism, are thought to have originated from bacterial cells that came to live in symbiosis inside their host. In plants, photosynthesis takes place in structures within their cells called chloroplasts. Without this oxygen supply to counterbalance the carbon dioxide we breathe out, most life on this planet, including us, would suffocate. Plucking carbon dioxide from the air, water from the ground and light from the sun, land plants make sugar and kick out oxygen as a waste product. Plants, algae and cyanobacteria use a chemical reaction known as photosynthesis to create the materials they need from what’s around them.