In this video, absolutely documentary from the zonal practice of the Faculty of Soil Science of Moscow State University, you will see a lot of interesting shots, I will comment them, and you will also see Nik, who will dig the soil cros-section and get the soil samples in this video ,
Now I’ll tell you everything in detail, but now you see a real soilscientist student who breaks into the soil thickness to find out what kind of soil is there on the first research point at Tula zaseki region.
And this is Nik, you might have seen him many times on the channel and by the way, it was him who collected soil monoliths from this practice for the World Soil Museum in the Netherlands. This soil was chernozem with amazing black mole route in the deeper layer.
Students of Moscow State University travel through different soil zones of Russia annualy that's why it's called "zonal practice". Everything starts with a zone of gray forest soils, this is the first stop, then we move further and further south, we arrive to a very interesting museum, we visit Yasnaya Polyana, and so on, we go to chernozem reagions, then visits many other points with intrazonal soils. Than we research kashtanovie (brown) soils over the dry steppe and we also visit Volgograd. Sometimes this practice reach even the sea it depends on recources.
The point is that students come to completely different environmental zones and study directly how the soil looks like in different climatic and soil zones. There are different vegetation, everything is different, so scientist live here in tents dig soil cros-sections. You look, you study, you provide research and take soil samples. Our camping looks like a real tent city like this. As it is documentary footage so everything looks like it was in a real time. We didn't film this footage for YouTube, it was just for fun. So nobody poses for the camera you can see real people walking around.
If you've been in field practice, you probably know that the most fun time, of course, is the evening bonfires, where you can relax and sing songs together. People are tired after research field day, open some kind of pack of stuffed stew, if you're lucky, you might have a pack of condensed milk with white bread. Play guitar and soil practice turns into songs around the fire and all sorts of funny communication, conversations, etc., no, of course, we also discuss the soil samples,study new interesting things that are useful. Such social component of this practice is very memorable!
Well, let's see what people are doing here, they are definitely discussing what interesting they found here, studied the chernozem soils, or what kind of soil inclusions did anyone find, then someone is collecting plants and dries them in order to create herbarium,
so in general practice consists of several elements - first is soil science, where you study the soil. Well, just like that, students literally come and start digging soil, create steps so that students and reseachers could go down and discover the soilwall that lightens by the sun. You can better see highlighted soil horizons and you can see what is happening in this soil.
But the most interesting thing is that in order to study this soil naturally, you first need to dig it out, touch it with hands and find the answer to your scientific hypotisys, and by the way, it's a good idea if you want to lose weight and get a good athletic shape, I strongly advise you to become soil scientist. They are usually very strong, tanned, they are digging soil cros-sections like this and it’s a cool way of such fitness. Than you leveling up your intellectual skills as well while you study the soil, look at nature, compare what you saw in textbooks with what you see in real life, and you gain experience.
And than evening comes again and we gather together around the fire and sing happy songs. By the way, Nick teaches people how to play the guitar on our music YouTube channel (Gitarka). Because he is the main singer in all these field practices, he sing loud scaring away the neighboring squirrels.
By the way, it's very important to return all soil from cross-section back to motherland after research so we put it back into a cut, you can’t just leave it outside and leave holes in the middle of a field or in a forest, otherwise you never know if someone falls in there, and it’s not good at all for the environment. And also you need to put each horizont back in proper order layer by layer, it's not a trivial task as may seem at first sight - you have both physical activity and a serious mental upgrade, because when a soil scientist studies the soil, he doesn’t just try to see what he sees before his eyes, he also tries to cover everything aroud such as relief and plants.
And yes, you also have to put a SPF-cream to your body to stay healthy and look nice while digging all this nature. We move from one point to another by bus and in each location we stude everything that happens around in nature: what kind of vegetation we see, which soil type we can find. Than we drive further, it's long trip and in the middle of nowhere you still get a break - it's time to eat! And now you see how students' things are being unloaded, this is food, these are tents, this is a field kitchen, and now the most pleasant event in life will take place. It's dinner! We can have either stationary food or field lunch.
You see an example of lunch in between two stations.At first we need to take everything out: there are containers with names, and usually we have the team which provides hot food for everyone using the field kitchen. Students have a rest and wait for an amazing dishes. You take your plate and cup and go to the line. It's good idea to take your own steel plate so it will not break during the expedition. I should say that such dinner-times are very important for everybody as you get very tired the open air. Of course you have a tent but you are just sleeping there, and the rest of the time you walk over the heels and through the forests,
and the most interesting thing is that you study soils in any weather it doesn’t matter if it rains it doesn’t matter if the sun is shining it doesn’t matter there if it will snow, anyway you will sit in soil cross-section in any weather even in a hurricane I guess - trying to understand nature.
Even if suddenly a real hurricane comes, you will still sit in the soil cross-section, do you think i am joking - and when thunderstorm starts the wind can blow everything away, but as we say nature doesn’t have bad weather and soil scientists also don’t have bad weather, so you dug a soil cross-section so you need to take an soil monolith. To take it out you have to put soil into large palette box and fix soil inside. I won’t reveal all the tricks of soil monoliths in this video, so subscribe to our channel and you'll get more secrets of soil scientists.
And now we arrived to the last stop in the dry steppe in the zone of brown soils. Everything looks so wonderful here, but there is a big difficulty in such an open steppe - it is very windy and if suddenly even a slight thunderstorm starts here or something like that it will blow away your tent very easily, so in such places it’s better to strengthen the tents very well and, of course, brew an amazing russian samovar with delicious cherry pies. And this is our tent for lectures and study, a place where training sessions take place - the names of soils are discussed by the different classifications and much more.
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