Guidelines for Analysis and Description of Soil and Regolith Thin Sections

For communication on observations it is very important that a clear, unambiguous terminology is used. This is especially true if one wants to compare observations made by different authors, and certainly when the construction of data bases is considered. Having this in mind, the international group that authored the “Handbook of Soil Thin Section Description” (Bullock et al., 1985), proposed a series of precisely defined concepts with associated terms, as was done before also by Brewer (1964). The advantage of a uniform terminology can easily be lost when the English terms get various translations in another language, e.g. by different authors. In order to overcome this problem G. Stoops published in1986, with the help of colleagues of different countries, a multilingual translation of the terminology of Bullock et al. (1985). For alteration patterns, a translation was proposed by Stoops et al. (1979).