Students dig in to study how soil can make Earth — and campus — a healthier place

Our Earth doesn’t have enough trees and plants to eliminate the excess, human-driven, carbon dioxide emissions through photosynthesis alone.

While soil can hide some pretty dirty secrets, it can also be an incredible lifeline to the Earth’s climate woes. Can the soil beneath our feet really help?

“Soil Science: The Dirt on Dirt,” a new class and lab — ERT 404LLB and ERT 504, respectively — in the Department of Earth Sciences brings together students from varying disciplines to unearth soil’s secrets and help expose them for a healthier campus and Earth.

“Soil is all around us, yet it is often overlooked,” notes Gina Ginevra Pope, assistant teaching professor, lab coordinator for ERT 105 and Earth Science Club faculty adviser.

Pope developed the course to help students learn to identify different soils and understand how they function. She explains that these skills are key to landing jobs that help manage natural resources, prevent geologic hazards, remediate contaminants, restore ecosystems, stabilize infrastructure, aid carbon sequestration and many other essential functions.

“The best way to learn about soil is to go out and get dirty with it,” Pope says.

Making good on her promise, she took her students — four graduate and nine undergraduate students from the departments of Earth Sciences, Environment and Sustainability and Indigenous Studies — to Buckhorn Island State Park on the northernmost point of Grand Island. There, they investigated the land, with each group of students taking three core, bulk-density soil samples. Using a large manual auger, the students collected constant volume samples that show how soil encounters various vegetation changes based on the depth of the sample.

After getting their hands dirty with sampling, they also got their feet wet while preparing and analyzing the samples. The students weighed the samples and put them in an oven to cook off the water and burn off the decaying organic matter. After the soil was fully prepped, they conducted a particle size analysis — and measured buoyancy changes — while putting the soil in a sodium hexametaphosphate water solution to help separate the mixture.

After completing these steps multiple times, the students reached a level of comfort with the process and took what they had learned to test the soil on the UB campus to see how humans have impacted things like how water flows into soil and what that means for flooding hazards. In October and November, the students sampled sites near Hochstetter Hall, Letchworth Teaching Forest and Lake LaSalle to gather a range of samples to compare throughout the semester. When taking the samples, students marked in their field notebooks that the soil was very diverse — by what was pulled up by location, as well as the variance in color and makeup according to the depth of each auger pull.  

“In addition to the practical lab and coursework applications to the workforce, another goal of what I’m really trying to lead students toward is learning more about carbon sequestration,” says Pope. Carbon sequestration is the intricate process of capturing — and storing — carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.

“The purpose is to, of course, increase carbon inputs, but also decrease carbon outputs. It’s a two-way street,” she says. “So, we also have to look into how to prevent some of that loss of organic matter. The increase in carbon in our atmosphere is due to the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, which took millions of years to form, meaning it will take millions of years to naturally turn back into rocks.”

While carbon sequestration occurs naturally through the process of photosynthesis and is great for the Earth, as it’s removing CO2 from the atmosphere, at the rate at which humans are producing CO2, the Earth’s trees and plants alone can’t work fast enough to offset these harmful greenhouse gas emissions, the major culprit for global warming.

“Many scientists used to ignore soil outside of agriculture and engineering applications, but now it is being recognized as a feasible solution for our climate crisis,” Pope says. “Who would’ve thought the dirt under our shoes could save our planet?”

The hopeful news is that scientists like Pope are paying attention to what soil can do. “Fossil fuels are a part of the slow carbon cycle; processes such as photosynthesis are a part of the fast carbon cycle. By burning fossil fuels, we’re taking a part of the slow carbon cycle and putting it in the fast carbon cycle, without a way to handle it,” explains Pope. “Turning that carbon back into its original form — rock — would be ideal, but let’s face it: Rocks take a long time to form, so soil is kind of our ‘middle ground.’ It’s part of both the fast and slow carbon cycles. A majority of our terrestrial carbon is stored in the soil.”

Pope says humans can put carbon back into that “stable” form — similar to what it is in solid rock — but on faster time scales. “This is why studying earth science and the rocks record is so important — the time scales and interconnectedness of Earth’s systems.”

At the end of the course, students worked with Pope to share their findings about the soil on campus and provide recommendations. The report, which Pope plans to publish on the Earth Sciences website, answers such questions as: How healthy is the soil on UB’s campus? What is the carbon sequestration potential of the soil? and “What can UB do to increase carbon sequestration?

The new soils course is a hit with students because it intersects geology, hydrology, environmental science, engineering, biology, geography and toxicology. Cora Mantell, a junior in geological sciences who expects to graduate early this May, believes the lab work is especially helpful because of its hands-on nature.

“Geology impacts everyone,” Mantell notes. “What we’re learning in this class is really important because soil impacts the water you drink, especially throwing pesticides and runoff into the mix. Of all the water on Earth, we only have 3% drinkable water,” she adds.

As a result of taking this course, Mantell is now conducting additional research with Pope on the soil at the UB Solar Strand.

The students also appreciated how the lab and the class worked in concert. Sydney Davis, a first-year master’s student who wants to be an environmental consultant, says this is her first soil class and feels it’s helping her toward her goals. “I love learning about different order and characteristics of soil, as well as participating in the hands-on lab work,” she says.

Students interested in taking Pope’s ERT 404LLB and ERT 504 class can register for the next session in fall 2026.