Here are some observations which show that soil does not originate with plant roots which break down rocks.

One of the first things kids are told in regard to science is that soil is created from rocks which are broken down by plant roots. That concept is not credible.

Soil has to exist before plants can exist. Plants cannot grow on rocks. Even if there were a starting soil, roots cannot contact rocks in a significant way. Roots need a three dimensional medium around them.

There is no magical acid seeping out of plant roots and into rocks. Roots produce extremely week organic acids (citrate, succinate, fumarate, etc.) which feed bacteria. These acids are very weak, rapidly forming salts at the same pH as the soil around them.

Plant roots do not kill bacteria in a major way with their organic acids. Instead, plants develop bacterial growth around them for symbiotic exploitation. If plant roots are not killing bacteria, they are not turning rocks into soil.

The first terrestrial plants to exist were nonwoody plants which were not hardy. Pre-Cambrian soil goes back much farther. It apparently originated with shale, which was broken down by oceans and formed sediments. Later, a much better layer of soil was added by a planet exploding, which allowed terrestrial life to begin.

Another problem is that soil doesn't have the same chemical composition as rocks. Soil is mostly clay, which is high in aluminum, while rocks are low in aluminum.

Here's proof that soil does not come from rocks. Along the Missouri River a few miles above the Big Bend Dam in South Dakota, there are Precambrian sea snails about a foot (30 cm) or more in diameter (similar to Nautilus). The shoreline is about 300 to 500 ft (100 to 150 m) below the surrounding terrain. If an ancient sea were the source, where did all the surrounding dirt come from.

The answers were created by an earthquake which occurred in the area in February 1983. Earthquakes were supposed to be impossible in the area, because there is supposedly a plate of granite under all of South Dakota at a depth of about 1800 feet (600 m). But the occurrence of the earthquake means there are two plates of granite rather than one.

The geological information in that earthquake is mind boggling. The quake occurred under a creek which separates west river gumbo from east river loam. The western half of South Dakota has a heavy, sticky soil called gumbo, while the eastern half has a much lighter loam. But there are places where the gumbo is on the east side of the river. The river did not strictly follow the line between the soil types.

It means the two soil types are on different tectonic plates. And the ancient snails were on a coastline before the two plates collided. The collisions created no mountains, which means the plates were so light and thin that they matched perfectly and linked together without external evidence beyond the soil types.

There were no plants or other terrestrial life at that time. So the different soil types were not created by plant roots. If plants created the soil after the plates collided, why did they create two types of soil? Where the division is on the east side of the river, the two types of soil are a few feet from each other. The differences could not be due to plant roots.

What the U.S. Geological Survey said about my analysis was that the snails were probably from the cretaceous age (only about 90 million years ago) existing in Pierre shale and originally in shallow seas. Obnoxious. Those types of snails are known to be Precambrian, and they are not in Pierre shale, they are in Precambrian sediments. Sediments and shale have no similarities. Precambrian sediment is unmistakable, because it contains red and yellow masses created by stromatolites which metabolized iron and sulfur. Shallow seas could not be located 500 ft below the surrounding terrain, and they would not produce snails 30 cm in diameter.

The USGS also said that "Very small (3.0 magnitude or less) earthquakes in your area are probably caused by compressed land continuing to rebound from the last glacial period, not from tectonic activity."

Absurd. I don't remember the magnitude of the quake (probably about 5.5), but it split my wood-frame house leaving the plaster cracked, and it cracked the concrete basement floor. The shaking rattled the house for 40 seconds.

What is an earthquake without tectonic activity? The shale doesn't belch out gas. It doesn't expand like a balloon. There is nothing to cause shaking but tectonic activity.

Most of the soil on earth fell down from space, part of it while the earth was forming, and presumably some more after a planet exploded where the asteroid belt is. A significant amount also results from volcanic debris.

Shale

It appears that shale was the closest thing to soil to be created while the earth was forming. Precambrian sediments would have originated with shale. Oceans would have eroded and dissolved shale. As the shale particles settled on the floor of the oceans, other substances would have been mixed with the sediment including salts. Terrestrial life could not begin under such conditions, because there were no fine particles of shale outside the ocean floors. Modern clay was added later, when a planet exploded. Only then could terrestrial life begin, which would have been the cause of the Cambrian explosion of life beginning 543 million years ago.

Geologists claim that shale is sedimentary. There are a variety of shale types. Some shale is highly structured with complex components. Water mixes everything and produces gradients which are not very complex. The structured shale would have resulted from particles settling from a primitive atmosphere, not a liquid. Where did the sedimentary shale originate? It had to come from someplace. The original shale would have settled from an atmosphere.

Why is shale dark gray? Probably for the same reason topsoil is black. Small amounts of aluminum in both oxidize to create the black color. Since shale is uniformly dark, it was all exposed to the same oxidation process, which means while the planet was forming. Oceans formed later.

Shale and clay are somewhat similar, except clay is more homogeneous and lighter color. This difference indicates that earth exposed shale to oxidation processes during formation, but the planet which exploded did not create the same oxidative environment.
 
The exploded planet would have been much larger than the earth, which is why it exploded. Due to its size, the clay which formed was more homogenous than the shale produced by earth. In other words, a small planet tends to mix molecules together more while forming, while a large planet results in more separation of materials. There is more gravity with a large planet, which does more separating.

There would have been more oxygen (or perchlorate) and silicone in contact with the clay for planet earth, which would have turned it into shale. It's largely silicone mixed with the clay that turns it into shale.

There's no such thing as Fossil Fuel Petroleum

There is some debate over the origins of so-called fossil fuels such as petroleum. The physics of energy settles the question.

Most scientists are claiming petroleum originated with biomass which underwent change under the ground. But there are critics, which include most Russian scientists, who claim petroleum has inorganic origins in carbonate which undergoes continual change very deep underground where heat and pressure act upon it, and then it moves toward the surface through cracks in the rocks.

The biomass origins looks ridiculous, because biomass is high in oxygen, while petroleum has no oxygen within it. To say that the oxygen was released due to time and pressure defies laws of chemistry and physics. The hydrogenated carbon of petroleum is in a much higher energy state than biomass. Where did the extra energy come from? Heat and pressure cannot provide the chemical energy.

There is a similar problem with the carbonate theory of the Russians. Carbonate is oxygenated and at a much lower energy state that petroleum. Heat and pressure cannot provide the chemical energy.

Heat is basically kinetic energy which has been randomized through molecules. Neither heat nor kinetic energy can be converted into chemical energy. Here's why: Chemical energy is in the motion of electrons which spin around atomic nuclei. Heat and kinetic energy are in the motion of nuclei. Electrons can influence the motion of nuclei, but nuclei cannot influence the motion of electrons, beyond irrelevant repositioning. Basically, radiation is required to add energy to electrons, when chemical or nuclear reactions are not occurring. There is no way to get energy from the nuclei to the electrons short of a nuclear explosion.

This means heat and pressure deep underground cannot add chemical energy to either biomass or carbonate to convert them into the hydrocarbons of petroleum.

So where did the petroleum come from. Entropy is the continual dissipation of energy from concentrated sources to less concentrated states. Entropy indicates that the energy was added to hydrocarbons early in the creation of the solar system, and the energy has been dissipating every since.

Scientists were theorizing that the earth had a reducing atmosphere early on. Reducing means a high energy state due to hydrogen, rather than oxygen, being attached to carbon. The hydrocarbons of petroleum could have been created or transformed under such reducing conditions.

Recently, scientists have been finding evidence of oxygen and water on planet earth at least four billion years ago. This is surprising to scientists who have been assuming an early reducing atmosphere. But this finding does not necessarily rule out an early reducing atmosphere. There still could have been hundreds of millions of years of reducing atmosphere.

It appears that the energetics of hydrocarbons requires that they be created under reducing conditions, which must have occurred very early in planet earth's history; and then the reduced hydrocarbons had to be protected from oxygenation by being buried underground.

These assumption negate both the biomass and carbonate origins of the hydrocarbons of petroleum.

These principles also apply to coal. Through whatever means plant fossils end up in coal, the reduced energy of coal cannot have biological origins, because there is no chemical mechanism for increasing the total energy state of the carbon without radiation. Biomass is in a lower chemical energy state than hydrocarbons.

Petroleum appears to have been created while the earth had a reducing atmosphere (before its present oxidizing atmosphere). Coal would have resulted from petroleum moving into biomass creating a combination of non-oxygenated material from the petroleum plus oxygenated material from the biomass.

Summary of Water Origins