Application of mineral magnetism to describe profile development of toposequences of a sedimentary soil in south-eastern Australia

Abstract

Mineral magnetism and chemical properties of soil profiles across a valley with an erosion gully in a Yellow Dermosol sedimentary soil suggest that the magnetic profile resulted from a combination of alluviation and pedogenesis. The concentration of soil magnetic minerals in a range of particle sizes (3.36–2 mm to <2 μm) diminished from the surface downwards to a minimum (referred to as layer P), then increased to high values (layer H), after which it decreased to bed rock level at the base layer. It is proposed that the H layer was the surface of a buried soil, and that the ferrimagnetic mineral through the profiles was dominantly maghemite, formed by fire enhancement.

The magnetic pattern of the profiles compressed as the soil became shallower up-slope, from 3 m in depth at the lowest site to 0.7 m at a site 40 m up-slope. Above this site the high susceptibility H layer was absent, which is consistent with the H layer being an earlier soil surface. Except for the profile at the very top of the slope (depth of 0.63 m), the magnetic grain size did not vary with depth. In the P layers, there was a greater proportion of paramagnetic minerals than in the other layers. The changes in magnetic susceptibility through the profiles were influenced by ferrimagnetic, paramagnetic, and canted anti-ferromagnetic material.

For all depths in all profiles the magnetic susceptibility changed consistently through the particle size range, decreasing from the larger sizes to the 10–20 m size then increasing slightly to the smallest size (<2 μm). The mean magnetic grain size also decreased through the particle size range. Magnetic particles of 3 concentration levels were extracted by a hand magnet from the 4 largest particle sizes and showed the same magnetic-particle size relationships, for both mass susceptibility and magnetic grain size, as the other particle sizes. This showed that the proportion of highly magnetic particles effectively determined the susceptibility and magnetic grain size features of the bulk samples of each particle size class.

The particle size/magnetic susceptibility pattern described in this paper occurs in all sedimentary soils and derived river sediments studied in this part of Australia. However, soils and sediments of granitic origin have an inverse pattern. These differences are attributed to pedogenic and geomorphological process. The difficulties in using mineral magnetic properties as a means of sourcing mobile sediments in catchments are discussed.