The Underground Network That Moves Carbon Into Soil
Scientists have produced the first global map of the mycorrhizal fungi that thread through the world's topsoil, and the scale is hard to picture: roughly 110 quadrillion kilometres of network, partnered with about 70% of all plant species, pulling an estimated 4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent into the soil each year, a little over a tenth of what humans emit. Published in Science and led by the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, it lands close to home for a cohort named after a fungus-spreading marsupial, because these are the same truffles the woylie digs up and scatters. The networks turn out to be densest in wild grasslands, among the least protected land on Earth and being lost to farmland faster than forests, and you cannot protect an infrastructure you have never seen, so putting it on a map is where the protecting starts.Scientists have produced the first global map of the mycorrhizal fungi that thread through the world's topsoil, and the scale is hard to picture: roughly 110 quadrillion kilometres of network, partnered with about 70% of all plant species, pulling an estimated 4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent into the soil each year, a little over a tenth of what humans emit. Published in Science and led by the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, it lands close to home for a cohort named after a fungus-spreading marsupial, because these are the same truffles the woylie digs up and scatters. The networks turn out to be densest in wild grasslands, among the least protected land on Earth and being lost to farmland faster than forests, and you cannot protect an infrastructure you have never seen, so putting it on a map is where the protecting starts.Expert summary pending. Showing the newcomer version.