Graduate student Elizabeth Herndon (geosciences) collects a soil pore fluid sample from the Susquehanna Shale Hills Observatory while Danielle Andrews (crop and soils science) prepares to measure the pH of the water. For additional photos of the research, click on the image above.
Iron furnaces that once dotted central Pennsylvania may have left a legacy of manganese enriched soils, according to Penn State geoscientists. This manganese can be toxic to trees, especially sugar maples, and other vegetation. The research, which quantified the amounts of manganese in soil core samples, was part of work done at the Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory, located in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation. "Our group's focus was to study the soil chemistry," said Elizabeth M. Herndon, graduate student in geosciences. "We saw excess manganese in the soil and decided that we needed to quantify the manganese and determine where it came from." Typically, manganese in soils comes from the disintegration of the bedrock as soil forms. Bedrock in this area is shale and the average amount of manganese in the shale is about 800 parts per million.
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