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Defining soil clay minerals as all inorganic particles < 2 µm would enhance their predictive power for soil functions. The future task is to unravel the prominent functional role of clay associations in the “ultimate particles” in soils–microaggregates. High energy techniques and decomposition of XRD patterns offer the prospect of understanding associations of silicates, oxides and organic matter within microaggregates.
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G. Jock Churchman (2018) studied this question.
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