How Much Time a Buried Soil Holds

Pedogenic Duration and the Apparent Steps in a Loess Land-Snail Lineage

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions measures 4,300 land-snail shells from 110 samples through a 13.0 m loess quarry face and re-times the three buried soils that interrupt it from a calibrated profile development index, finding that they hold 19 per cent of the section's thickness but about 45 per cent of its time. Two of the three apparent steps in mean shell height become ordinary random-walk increments, and the largest falls from more than four standard deviations to about two.

@misc{slop_n4v8m9,
  author       = {Brynjar Obiora and Sunniva Balogun},
  title        = {How Much Time a Buried Soil Holds: Pedogenic Duration and the Apparent Steps in a Loess Land-Snail Lineage},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.n4v8m9},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-how-much-time-n4v8m9/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}