Abstract:
The freeze-thaw cycle process is a typical special phenomenon in the high latitude cold region, and the freeze-thaw cycle changes the soil structure. In this experiment, the black soil of cultivated land in typical areas of Northeast China was taken as the research object, and through indoor simulation freeze-thaw test, three initial mass moisture contents of 20%, 24% and 28%(W1, W2 and W3) and four snow depths of 0, 30, 60 and 90 mm(L0, L1, L2 and L3) were set, for a total of 12 treatments. The overall test adopts a gradient freeze-thaw cycle temperature of-16-4 ℃,-12-8 ℃,-8-12 ℃,-4-16 ℃, and each freeze-thaw temperature cycle was cycled twice, for a total of eight freezethaw processes. The effects of freeze-thaw cycles on soil structure under different treatments were determined. The results showed that:(1) The soil pore size distribution changed under the action of freeze-thaw, and the increase of the initial moisture content of the soil inhibited the increase of macropore content and the decrease of micropore content in the soil after freeze-thaw, while the micropore size of the soil after freeze-thaw increased with the increase of snow depth, and the macropore size decreased with the increase of snow depth, and the remaining pore sizes did not fluctuate much.(2) Freeze-thaw reduces soil particle size, but the increase of initial soil moisture content would inhibit the transformation of microaggregates to clay particles under freeze-thaw, while the continuous increase of initial moisture content would transform the overall soil particle size to microaggregates.(3) Freeze-thaw changed soil stability, among which Mean weight diameter(MWD),Geometric mean diameter(GMD), >0.25 mm hydrostable aggregates(WR>0.25) and soil erodability K values decreased, and the aggregate failure rate(PAD) and fractal dimension D increased. Soil stability was mainly affected by the content of large aggregates(>2 mm), smal aggregates(0.25-2 mm) and clay particles(<0.106 mm).(4) Through multivariate ANOVA, it could be seen that the number of freeze-thaw times was the main driving factor of soil structure change, the initial soil moisture content played a secondary role in the influence of soil structure, and the change of snow depth had few effect on soil structure.