Scientists Mapped An Underground Fungal Network So Vast It Could Reach The Sun One Billion Times.
Beneath your feet, there is a fungal network stretching through every forest, meadow, and garden on Earth so vast that scientists have only just managed to map it for the first time. A study in the journal Science reveals that Earth's topsoil contains around 68 quadrillion miles of these arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks, equal to nearly one billion times the distance from Earth to the Sun. In a single teaspoon of healthy soil, there can be up to 32 feet of microscopic threads. The fungi have partnered with plant roots for 500 million years, acting as an underground internet ferrying water, nutrients, and carbon between plants and soil. Around 90 percent of all plant species depend on these partnerships. The research team used machine learning to analyze more than 16,000 soil samples and produce the first-ever global map of these networks. "It makes part of the invisible visible," said one scientist not involved in the study.
AM fungi store around 330 million tons of carbon, four to six times the carbon in all living humans, and move the equivalent of 4.4 billion tons of CO2 into soils every year, about 11 percent of all human CO2 output. Wild grasslands in South Sudan, the Tibetan Plateau, and the Florida Everglades hold 40 percent of the planet's AM fungal biomass but are among the least protected ecosystems on Earth. Croplands have roughly half the fungal density of wild ecosystems. The map is available as a free interactive online tool. For the researchers, it is both a scientific milestone and an urgent conservation call. What has been invisible for half a billion years finally has a face.
