You guys are pretty wide of the mark. Here's the justification:
You can think of soils as a huge buffer that acts as a barrier between the many things we apply to it on the surface and the groundwater below. Water flow through soils is how contaminants move from point a to point b. Big field scale models incorporate fairly complex equations describing the physical transport of contaminants along with water. These equations have input parameters that are all empirical. With the above experiments we are able to directly measure things like pore size distribution, porosity, pore connectivity, and tortuosity that have always before been estimated (or more commonly fitted). This is a big deal for those researchers studying transport through porous media. The peltier was used to subject the soil particles to freezing and thawing in succession to see how that might change the pore structure of the aggregates. This was all preliminary data collection; much more interesting stuff is being done now.
Not everyone doing research in colleges of agriculture is a farmer, btw.
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