Aeolian processes, involving erosion, transportation and deposition of sediment by the wind, occur in a variety of environments, including beaches, semi-arid and arid regions, agricultural fields. Wind, blowing over dry sand, initiates movement in much the same way as water. The result is that sands moved by air tend to very well sorted and also well rounded. There are three modes of sediment transport by wind: creep or reputation, saltation, and suspension. Erosion by wind involves abrasion and deflation. Major dust source areas Tchad, the Aral Sea area, SE Iran, and the loess plateau of China. Aeolian deposits include sand seas and dune fields, deposit of silt and fine – grained material. Dunes are composed of moderately to well – sorted sands (63-1000µm) with a mean grain size in the range 160-300 µm. Most dune sands are composed of quartz, but may include significant quantities of feldspar. Major areas of sand seas lie in the tectonically desert regions of the Sahara, Arabian Peninsula, Australia, S. Africa and central Asia. Many Aeolian deposits are formed during the Quaternary Era, thus they have, been now soils. In SRTS 2012, Psammosol is the soil type developed from Aeolian sand, including soils that have a mollic, an umbric or an ochric A horizon, followed by parent materials of Aeolian sandydeposits ≥50 cm thick and have ≤12% clay. We have analysed and compared soil profiles from Banat region (Lovrin), Satu Mare (NW of Romania) – Nir river, and Oltenia region (Dăbuleni). Psammosols correlated in WRB-SR-1998 with Arenosols. Arenosols are a reference soils group with a texture that is coarser than sandy loam to a depth of least 100 cm from the surface and having less than 35 per cent of rock fragments. These soils occur on deep Aeolian, marine, lacustrine and alluvial sands. The total estimated extent is 900 million hectares, because the modern Geology classified rocks using Latin terms (arena – sand, rudectus – stony, lutum – loamy, and argilla - clay), we consider that aspect important for our Latin language, and in that view promote to substitute Psammosol with Arenosol. Evidently, there are many reasons for that, exponded in this article.

erosion, aeolian, SRTS, WRB, soil

Presentation: oral