Soil micromorphology. Field strategies and sample preparation

Abstract

Soil science applies standard methods to describe soil profiles, following directions in field handbooks. This paper presents a summary of a standard description com-plemented with a field descriptive method from sedimentology. Using these methods in a personalized, pragmatic way during field work, collecting as much information as possible about the soil, gives rise to possibilities for relating further laboratory analysis to the field situation. This is a very important aspect of the soil micromorphological method, a continuation of the field-descriptive method, except for sample preparation and the use of microscopic techniques. The second part of this paper describes a method to impregnate soil samples with a polyester resin, as the first step towards the production of thin sections.