Soil

“If I could do it all over again, and relive my vision in the twenty-first century, I would be a microbial ecologist.

Ten billion bacteria live in a gram of ordinary soil, a mere pinch held between thumb and forefinger. They represent thousands of species, almost none of which are known to science. Into that world I would go with the aid of modern microscopy and molecular analysis.

I would cut my way through clonal forests sprawled across grains of sand, travel in an imagined submarine through drops of water proportionately the size of lakes, and track predators and prey in order to discover new life ways and alien food webs.

All this, and I need venture no farther than ten paces outside my laboratory building. The jaguars, ants and the orchids would still occupy distant forests in all their splendor, but now they would be joined by an even stranger and vastly more complex living world virtually without end.” – E.O. Wilson, The Naturalist

Deceptively simple, comprised of a matrix of minerals and organic materials, a universe silently pulses and throbs in the soil underneath us; there are a million times more cells on earth than there are stars in the sky, with more than half of the earth’s living organisms found in soil.

Ubiquitous and literally under our feet, dirt is easy to take for granted. Commonly extending six to eight feet down to the subsoil layer, soil is one of the hallmarks of life on our planet. In addition to providing the foundation on which plants grow, it provides a substrate of nutrients upon which plant roots feed. It acts as a sponge, regulating the speed with which water passes through, filtering and purifying water.

Predicting what the earth has to offer humans in the future requires a better understanding of how the movement of water and carbon through soil will change. Indeed, much of the uncertainty around the pace of climate change involves dirt.  Dirt holds about three times as much carbon as the atmosphere and plant life combined. To the extent that warmer temperatures increase plant productivity, more carbon will flow into soil, slowing climate change. Conversely, to the extent that warmer temperatures increase soil microbial activity, thereby increasing decomposition, carbon will flow from soil to the atmosphere, accelerating climate change.  Which dynamic wins out depends in significant part on water.

While it is easy to say that understanding dirt is the key to predicting our future, it’s a whole other thing to predict how the ability of dirt to mediate the flows of carbon and water will respond to a changing climate. But that is exactly what Dr. Corey Lawrence and his collaborators are doing through their RMBL project, the Regional Assessment of Drought Impacts on Soils (RADIS) (see adjoining article).

The science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “If you see a whole thing- it seems that it is always beautiful. Planets, lives…. But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.” The wonder of scientists like Corey working at RMBL is how it adds to the overall pattern, connecting to what we know about things such as soil microbial genomics and plant community dynamics. Each study is a critical piece of the puzzle, supporting the most comprehensive look at any ecosystem, anywhere on earth.

Join RMBL in doing the hard work in capturing the beauty and diversity of life!