Silt is a word that people use a bit loosely to mean 'fine material'. In fact, it is material between sand size and clay size. Silt is really too fine to see with the naked eye, but when you feel it, it has a slippery, almost soapy feel.

Normally silt is mixed in with other kinds of material. But if you live somewhere where people say you have a soil that is made of wind-blown materials (geographers call it a loess soil), then you have a soil made almost entirely of silt.

The biggest areas of silty soils are across the northern part of the American Midwest and the middle of China.

Silt is easily washed away if the soil is exposed. In China, the silt washed off the soils gets into the Yangtze River and gives the river its other name 'the Yellow River'.

Another place where silty soils were exposed was north of Texas in an area that became called the Dust Bowl. When farmers ploughed the land, they took away the protecting prairie grasses, and then the wind blew the silty soil away. The video below shows you that.