caliche
9.9
A natural soil or rock that has many nitrate salts used for fertilizer
- noun
- /kəˈliːtʃi/
- Specialized
:
caliche
- Some people in Southport ranch cattle or own farms, and a lucky few repair helicopters at the Army Depot, but most men in that area haul shrimp for a living, or they work in the pits outside of town mining caliche to lay foundations and cover roads.
Examples
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The miners extracted caliche from the ground to sell it for use in fertilizers.
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Caliche is commonly used in construction to create a solid base for caliche roads.
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Farmers in the region often dig into caliche to access the nutrient-rich soil beneath.
Compounds
Surface Forms
Etymology
The word caliche was also used by Spanish-speaking miners in Chile and Peru for salty, nitrate-rich earth they dug to get sodium nitrate, so caliche can also mean the rock or soil deposit rich in nitrates that miners collected in those deserts.
