SMELLBOOK REFERENCE · SB-0013
Soil
Permanent ID: smellbook: · updated 2026-10-06, revision 4
Character EDITORIAL
Soil smells earthy, damp and dark, with a mineral note and a rich organic depth.
Words: earthy, damp, mineral, organic. Families: Wood, earth and stone.
States: wet (VERIFIED). A state says how an entry is met, such as wet, aged or roasted. It does not create a new smell, and it adds no scientific fact by itself: states marked EDITORIAL come from the entry's own records, and only those marked VERIFIED are reported by a VERIFIED claim.
Met in: Garden, Forest.
Evidence
Scientific evidence
- Petrichor and rain on dry ground (CLM-PETRICHOR-001; VERIFIED, not checked against the source text). I. J. Bear & R. G. Thomas, Nature of Argillaceous Odour, Nature, 1964.
- Geosmin and the odour of moist soil (CLM-GEOSMIN-001). N. N. Gerber & H. A. Lechevalier, Geosmin, an Earthy-Smelling Substance Isolated from Actinomycetes, Applied Microbiology, 1965; Jiaoyang Jiang, Xiaofei He & David E. Cane, Biosynthesis of the earthy odorant geosmin by a bifunctional Streptomyces coelicolor enzyme, Nature Chemical Biology, 2007.
Molecules named in these claims: geosmin. A molecule listed here is named in a VERIFIED claim about this smell. It is not presented as the cause of the smell; each claim says what its source supports.
Cite
SmellBook. (2026). Soil (revision 4, 2026-10-06). SmellBook Public Atlas. smellbook:smell:soil. https://smellbook.com/smells/soil
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