Genesis and Parent Material Uniformity Appraisal of some Adjacent Soils to Bani Mazar-El Boiety Road, El Minia, Egypt

Perception of soil’s history is an essential in addressing the imperious issues related to the sustainable agricultural development and land degradation in the hyper arid and arid regions. Therefore, the current work was undertaken to appraise of pedogenesis and parent material uniformity using Computer Controlled Scanning Electron Microscopy (CCSEM) technique. Five soil profiles (P1, P2, P3, P4, and P5) were selected for study on a topo-sequence model representing most of ground elevations of some soils adjacent to Bani Mazar-El Boiety road at western hyper arid desert of El Minia, Egypt (30◦15`40 to 30◦28`58E and 28◦31`40 to 28◦33`00N 100 to 170 m A.S.L.;54 km2). The data of CCSEM showed that the weighted means (%) correlated to the ground elevation of Opaque minerals varied between 30.18 at (150-160 m; P4) and 43.81 at (140- 150 m; P2) while Pyroboles diverged between 40.85 at (150-160 m; P4) and 92.80 at (140-150 m; P5), Zircon (Z) ranged between 0.85 at (140-150 m; P2) and 15.79 at (160- 170 m; P3), Rutile (R) values were 2.14 at (160-170 m; P3) and 30.09 at (150-160 m; P4), contents of Tourmaline (T) were 0.72 at (110-120 m; P1) and 6.51 at (150-160 m; P4), Garnet varied between 0.17 at (160-170 m; P3) and 0.86 at (140-150 m; P2) within the studied soils, reflecting the heavy mineral suite was influenced by topo-sequence of the research area also indicating the study soils are recently formed, weakly developed, and have low effect of pedogenic processes. Irregular vertical distribution with depth of Z/T, Z/R, Z/R+T ratios, and index figure proved that soil parent materials were stratified in nature and apparently formed of multi-depositional regimes. Scanning electron micrographs also confirmed that the investigated soils most probably transported and originated by water agent to distances not far away. The same conclusions have been indicated by applying the grain size analysis of sand fraction reported by Folk and Ward (1957).