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“Cardenite,” a trioctahedral montmorillonoid derived from biotite*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2018

Douglas M. C. MacEwan*
Affiliation:
Pedology Department, Rothamsted Experimental Station, Harpenden, (Herts.)
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Extract

In a letter to “Nature” in 1937, Mitchell and Muir directed attention to the existence, in certain Scottish soils derived from basic igneous parent material, of a very high total cation exchange capacity relative to the clay content—as high as 9 m. eq./gm. clay in some cases. These values were so high as effectively to preclude the possibility of the clay itself being solely responsible for the cation exchange capacity, and in fact in those cases where it was very high relative to clay content, the clay content itself was generally low, so that the cation exchange capacity of the whole soil was quite moderate, of the order of 0·3 m. eq./gm. The high cation exchange capacity could not be due to organic material, for it often occurred in lower layers where the organic matter content was likely to be low.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1954

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Footnotes

*

Most of the work described in this paper was done while the author was employed at the Macaulay Institute for Soil Research in Aberdeen. I wish to acknowledge the help given by numerous conversations with Dr A. Muir. The name proposed is derived from the Carden Wood, Aberdeenshire, near which the soil sample (No. BB63) was taken.

References

Faust, G. T. and Murata, K. J., 1953. Stevensite redefined. Amer. Miner. 38, 973.Google Scholar
MacEwan, D. M. C., 1944. Identification of the montmorillonite group of minerals by X-rays. Nature 154, 577.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacEwan, D. M. C., 1949. Some notes on the recording and interpretation of X-ray diagrams of soil clays. J. Soil Sci. 1, 90103.Google Scholar
Mitchell, R. L. and Muir, A., 1937. Base exchange capacity and clay content of soils. Nature 139, 552.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stephen, I., 1952. A study of rock weathering with reference to the soils of the Malvern Hills. I. Weathering of biotite and granite. J. Soil Sci. 3, 2033.CrossRefGoogle Scholar