Spring Planning Friday, April 28, 2023
Burras: Glaciers nurtured life and built soil
By DARCY DOUGHERTY MAULSBY
I
Farm News writer
owa is blessed with some of the world’s most fertile soil. Ever wondered why? It goes much deeper than the prairies that once covered the state. “Iowa’s soils start with glaciers that moved across this region thousands of years ago,” noted Dr. C. Lee Burras, a
professor of agronomy at Iowa State University. “Glaciers are huge masses of flowing ice that have shaped our world.” Thousands of years ago, Iowa was covered by a series of glaciers. Glaciers are akin to a river with a turbulent current, Burras added. “The bottom of all that moving ice breaks rocks free. Rocks break apart. When the glaciers got far enough south of the North Pole, they started to melt, and all that
sediment dropped out.” The most recent glacier that pushed into Iowa (roughly 15,000 years ago) created the Des Moines Lobe, which covers all or parts of 22 counties in north-central, northwest, west-central Iowa and central Iowa. The level to gently rolling land in the Des Moines Lobe is intensively cropped. See SOIL, Page 5D
-Farm News photo by Darcy Dougherty Maulsby
THE MOST RECENT glacier that pushed into Iowa (roughly 15,000 years ago) created the fertile Des Moines Lobe and left about 600 billion tons of loess in Iowa. The farm shown here is located in the Loess Hills of western Iowa.
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