Soil Porosity

       To measure the porosity of our soil, we filled a beaker with 200 mL of dry soil. Then we filled a graduated cylinder with 100mL of water and poured the water into the soil until it began to pool on the surface of the soil.

This short video clip shows the water being poured into the soil:

This is what the beaker of soil looked like with water pooling on the top:

There were 27 mL of water left in the graduated cylinder.

Calculations:

       The soil absorbed 73 mL of water, which filled the empty spaces in the soil. This means that there was 73 mL worth of empty space in 200 mL of soil, which gives the soil a porosity of 36.5%.

       One observation we made was that the soil became more compact once we added the water. Below is a side view of the beaker after the water was added.

The soil and water together only take up about 175 mL of space in the beaker. This could have caused some error in the calculations.