It doesn't have to go anywhere, it can just "die" - lose its ability to hold water, nutrients, fungus, microbes - everything necessary for it to be beneficial to plants.
So they've done what's all too common these days... gone and changed what a word means.
Dead topsoil is dead topsoil. It doesn't become rock or subsoil or something else.
The title of this post is "corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil". It should be "a third of the top soil in the corn belt is badly degraded" or something like that.
Have they? It's common vernacular to say we lost something even if it isn't "i lost my keys" but "We lost the last dodo bird"... doesn't mean we can't find it, but, what we had will never be again.
In many cases of periods of time longer than humans live...
We're shitty stewards... I've seen jeepers drive over tundra and do donuts not realizing their burnouts won't recover in a lifetime and other morons see them out there and think it means they can follow suit and before long the entire basin is destroyed...
sure... it will recover... when humans are dead, or when we pull our heads out of our asses :)
