Аннотация:Abstract—This study shows that time has always been regarded by soil scientists as a “special” factor of soilformation (pedogenesis), that is, not merely as an external driver but as a form of existence of soil as a materialbody. Soil-forming processes are almost invariably nonlinear in time and cyclic in nature; however, thiscyclicity is rather often disrupted by the flux-like (continuously displaced in space) nature of soil formation.Soil, as a natural body, obeys internal laws of self-development—most notably, the erasure of lithomemoryand the development of pedomemory within a single evolutionary stage or burst—and, at the same time, issubjected to various external influences, including anthropogenic impacts. Under these conditions, soil systems may theoretically exhibit all major types of nonlinear dynamical behavior, including chaos, multistability, amplitude damping, and solitons. Changes in the soil state over time within a single stage of multistageevolution are usually described by a logistic equation. Differentiation of the soil state function S with respectto time t makes it possible to characterize the rate (dS/dt) and the acceleration (d2S/dt2) of soil-forming processes. Inflection points on the soil-state curve correspond to extrema on the curves of the derivatives ofpedogenesis. It is noted that dissipative processes dominate during the first half of an evolutionary stage,whereas antidissipative processes prevail during its second half. The predominance of dissipative over antidissipative processes is, however, not uniform: initially, it is associated with an increase in the acceleration of soilformation, and subsequently with the phase of its decline.Keywords: soil processes, nonlinearity, cyclicity, flux-like behavior, rate of soil formation
