Fougerite a Natural Layered Double Hydroxide in Gley Soil: Habitus, Structure, and Some Properties

International audienc

Geochemical Methods to Assess Agriculture Sustainability

Facing global changes and the challenge of food security, scientists are being questioned by decision-makers and stakeholders on the sustainability of agro-systems. The main difficulty in dealing with this question is to obtain enough data over long periods of time. Monitoring slow drifts and weak noises is needed to forecast tipping points that can jeopardize the present steady state. High-resolution datations by radiocarbon coupled with detailed palynological determinations in sediments, historical archives on yields and crop quality, and high-frequency field in situ measurements give information on climatic changes from multi-secular to seasonal and hourly time scales. In the long term, climatic forcing dominates agriculture performance, at that time only organic agriculture, with oscillations between prosperity and misery driven by climate and intermediated by civilization flourishing and collapsing; in the medium term, in modern agriculture, irrigation provides a provisional buffering effect on yield and crop quality despite present warming; in the short term, either under non-fertilized forested ecosystem or intensive rice cropping, the same patterns are evidenced and point to the importance of soil microflora shifting from aerobiosis to anaerobiosis. In all cases, geochemistry offers appropriate tools to decipher the climate-soil-agriculture complex interplay

Kinetic Citrate-Bicarbonate Extraction of Green Rust Fougerite and Mineralogical Controls by XRD and Mössbauer Spectroscopy

Fougerite (IMA 2003-057) is a layered double hydroxysalt, the natural mineral of green rusts (GRs) and has been observed as a major iron phase in hydromorphic soils and several reductic environments. Its general formula is [Fe1−x 2+ Mgy 2+ Fex 3+(OH)2+2 y ]x+[(x)OH−,mH2O]x− where x=Fe3+/Fetot.. Natural GRs in the environment are difficult to study due to their reactivity and their small concentration. Chemical extractions with citrate-bicarbonate (CB), and mineralogical controls by XRD and Mössbauer spectroscopy (MS) were performed at different times of contact (0, 1, 6, 48, 168 and 504 h). This protocol was applied on soil samples taken in a reductic horizon at 80 cm depth of the Gleysol where fougerite was originally characterized. Kinetic extraction of Si by CB reached slowly 1.8% of absolute total concentration in the soil after 504 h. Al extracted by CB increased quickly to 9.4% until 6 h and then gradually until 48 h to reach 12% and stayed constant until 504 h. Fe and Mg increased quickly respectively to 23% and 56% after 6 h and then gradually and linearly to 97% and 69%. Kinetic extractions by CB reveal two distinct mineral compartments: - a first mineral form of Si-Al with Fe and Mg as minors; - then fougerite with a very nice congruence with Mg, showing that fougerite contains about 10% of Mg. After 168 h, CB extraction on the initial sample did not affect significantly any of the main peaks of the XRD patterns. MS on initial soil sample before CB treatment showed characteristic hyperfine interaction parameters of fougerite- GR, with x=Fe3+/Fetot. mole ratio of 0.43. After 6 and 48 h of CB extraction, x mole ratios were respectively 0.406 and 0.346. After 168 and 504 h of CB treatments, spectra did not show any peak. This disappearance of fougerite-GR, attested by MS, and the dynamics of iron extraction by CB in kinetics proved the selectivity of CB procedure to dissolve fougerite. (Texte intégral

Physico-chimie des cuirasses latéritiques. Domaines de stabilité des oxydes et hydroxydes de fer et d'aluminium

Trolard Fabienne. Physico-chimie des cuirasses latéritiques. Domaines de stabilité des oxydes et hydroxydes de fer et d'aluminium. Strasbourg : Institut de Géologie – Université Louis-Pasteur, 1988. 152 p. (Sciences Géologiques. Mémoire, 81

Physico-chimie des cuirasses latéritiques. Domaines de stabilité des oxydes et hydroxydes de fer et d'aluminium

Trolard Fabienne. Physico-chimie des cuirasses latéritiques. Domaines de stabilité des oxydes et hydroxydes de fer et d'aluminium. Strasbourg : Institut de Géologie – Université Louis-Pasteur, 1988. 152 p. (Sciences Géologiques. Mémoire, 81

Les "oxydes" de fer des latérites et des sols hydromorphes: géochimie, minéralogie et modélisations thermodynamiques

Agrégation de l'enseignement supérieur -- UCL, 199

Lands, cities and campaigns face to the climate change and urban sprawl : an innovative IT platform and forecasting decision support tool for local authorities.

The European PRECOS project, that it has just start, proposes an innovative IT platform and forecasting decision support tool (Astuce &Tic) giving a synthetized vision of an area, measuring in real time, pressures, resilience potential and tipping points over natural resource assets and helping to manage ecosystem services under mounting climate and anthropogenic pressures. This has potential for radically transforming land management and resources based services and facilitating the transition of local stakeholders and economic actors to the quaternary economy. The Astuce & Tic approach is the result of a public private collaborative R&D project, financed with the help of French national and regional financing programs between 2008 and 2011. It developed IT tools to model and simulate the complex interactions between economic development, land allocation, climate, underground water, agriculture and irrigation, and applied them on a demonstration area: the Crau area in south of France. On Crau area, we demonstrate that (i) urban sprawl uses up significant surfaces of natural and farmland and we show that between 1997 and 2009 up to 1600 ha have been irreversibly destroyed; (ii) grasslands’ gravity irrigation is a sustainability factor in the area and (iii) agricultural activities are a source of vital ecosystems services and contribute to 75% of the renewal of groundwaters. In a prospective vision to 2030 horizon, the Astuce & Tic approach put to light the fact that the consumption of land resources for economic activities generated too much strain on the water cycle and that, if nothing major is done, in less than twenty years, underground water would function in a reverse mode, i.e. that salt will progressively poison the ground making centuries of efforts wasted in no time. This example highlights both the dramatic reality that the competition for urban land may take, and also the fact that the impact may not always be noticed on the local scale and that governance must also be effective at more global scale than the level of prima facie decision