The Soils of Pittsburgh and Their Effects on the Development of Land Use in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Chileski, Luke

The Soils of Pittsburgh and Their Effects on the Development of Land Use in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Persistent URL

https://dspace.allegheny.edu/handle/10456/56707

Author(s)

Chileski, Luke

Date Issued

April 28, 2023

Abstract

A literature review was performed to ascertain how much of an impact the different soil profiles of Pittsburgh affected the development of the city through the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. The soils of Pittsburgh owe much of their current form to glacial outwash originating in the late Wisconsinan glaciation event, lacustrine deposits from Lake Monongahela, a lake formed from the blockage of the Monongahela River’s paleoflow, and the modern fluvial environments provided by the three rivers of Pittsburgh. These soils are broken into associations dominantly unaltered by urban development that have various characteristics and associations dominantly altered by urban development and are predominantly a silt loam and exhibit a fine to very fine grain size. Urban soils and strip mines, however, are difficult to categorize. Pittsburgh’s land use began largely as a small, concentrated town, growing and expanding ever outward as it urbanized, with many different soil profiles overtaken by the city. It was determined that, while soil profiles quite likely played a role in the early development of Pittsburgh, more modern urbanization points to the urbanization dictating what the soil is, instead of the other way around. Finally, predictions were made for what this meant for the remaining unaltered soil associations, if remediation would be possible for urban soils back to some more natural soil, and how this work may apply to other cities around the nation.

Major

Geology

First Reader(s)

Whitenack, Lisa B.