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 never did seem credible to me.

Soil is often several hundred feet deep. Supposedly, glaciers turn it under. But once the soil covers the rocks, the plant roots no longer contact the rocks. So how come the soil is usually deeper than plant roots go? Supposedly, rocks are churned to the top. But there is way too much complexity in soil for such churning effects. Churning would have to totally homogenize soil to convert rocks to soil.

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 Cambrian 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 Precambrian 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. The collision would have occurred about one billion years ago, or perhaps a little longer, which is the age of the snails.

There were no plants or other terrestrial life during the Precambrian era. 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 Cambrian, and they are not in Pierre shale, they are in Cambrian sediments. Sediments and shale have no similarities. Precambrian or Cambrian 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 woodframe house leaving the plaster cracked, and it cracked the concrete basement floor. Claiming that compressed land creates an earthquake, where there is supposedly no fault line, 10,000 years after a glacier is obnoxious.

The soil, of course, 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 debri.