On extreme exoplanets, the "soil" isn't made of dirt. The ground beneath your feet could be an ocean of boiling magma, bare volcanic rock, or freshly fallen rock snow.
For years, astronomers theorized that the super-Earth 55 Cancri e was a "diamond planet" with a mantle of carbon and a surface crusted in graphite and diamond.
However, recent observations by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have challenged this carbon-rich model. Rather than a solid diamond crust, the surface is a global magma ocean shrouded by an atmosphere containing carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. Any solid ground that briefly cools into a crust is transient, inevitably sinking back into the global lava sea.
On the rocky lava world K2-141b, the "soil" on the planet's nightside is continuously replenished by literal rock storms. The intense heat on the star-facing hemisphere vaporizes the crust itself, forming a thin atmosphere of gaseous minerals like silicon and sodium. Supersonic winds drag these mineral vapors across the terminator line to the dark side, where temperatures plunge to frigid extremes. The vapor condenses and falls as rocky snow and rain, burying the nightside in freshly precipitated mineral drifts. This silicate soil is eventually pulled back into the dayside magma ocean by fluid currents to restart the cycle.
Some exoplanetary surfaces resemble Earth’s volcanic regions but exist entirely without an atmosphere. The rocky exoplanet LHS 3844b orbits its star so closely that any atmospheric gases have been stripped away. Infrared data suggests its solid, dark surface is composed almost entirely of low-silica materials like volcanic basalt or olivine. Without air, water, or wind to erode it, the crust remains a stark, unweathered expanse of volcanic rock, left exposed to the vacuum of space.