From geology, a term referring to a highly pedalfer soil occuring in areas of very heavy rainfall such as rain forests. Laterites are soils that have nearly all of their valuable and soluble minerals carried away by rainfall. Laterites are usually red because of the high proportions of iron compounds left behind after all the potassium, calcium, and phosphorus has journeyed off to the sea.
Laterites are severely impoverished soils, and due to their subceptability to runoff, even fertilizer does little to help. They are able to support rich ecosystems like rain forests due to the freely available water and the abilities of complicated webs of organisms to trap and store nutrients, but they are not at all suited to agriculture, despite what westernized society thinks.
This is what my father's college geology book*, dated 1939, has to say about laterites:
"The extreme example of the pedalfers are the laterite soils of the tropics, where the heavy rainfall causes intensive leaching. That is one reason why, in the equatorial rain forest belt, small clearings are cultivated for only a year or two and then allowed to revert to their natural condition."
Ah, for the
halcyon days when
we did not find it necessary to inflict on our children guilty nightmares of burning trees and black smoke . . .
*Dad's not really that old. The book is
Geomorphology by
A K Lobeck.