A four-day tour of the 400 square-mile Desert Project will be held from May 21 to 25, 2007 in Las Cruces. The tour will begin each morning at New Mexico State University and consists of field stops at soils ranging from less than 150 years to over 2,000,000 years old. Fundamentals in soil classification, soil morphology, and soil-geomorphic relations will be illustrated at large trenches and arroyo exposures, some of which extend through several kinds of soils and illustrate soil boundaries. Tour stops will also illustrate glacial-interglacial effects on landscape stability, pedogenic carbonate accumulation, destruction of argillic horizons, micromorphology, orographic effects on organic matter accumulation, and repeat photography of vegetation since the 1960s.

In 1957 Leland Gile and Robert Ruhe moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico to begin the Desert Soil-Geomorphology Project of the U.S. Soil Conservation Service. At that time, little was known about soils in arid and semiarid regions of the American Southwest away from alluvial valley floors. This study was undertaken to learn more about the morphology, classification, and genesis of desert soils and their relation to late-Cenozoic landscape evolution and climate change, and to develop principles that would assist with the mapping of soils in similar geomorphic settings elsewhere.

Contact Information

Desert Project Tour
Curtis Monger
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, N.M. 88003-0003
Phone: 505-646-1910
Fax: 505-646-6041
Email: cmonger@nmsu.edu
URL: http://desertprojecttour.nmsu.edu