The Hidden Majority: What Are Soil Microbes? Soil microbes are microscopic organisms that live in the soil, including bacteria, fungi, archaea, protozoa, and viruses.

Earth’s long-term climate controlled by just 12% of the landscape New work makes sense of mismatches between the lab and the planet's behavior.

What fossil records tell us about when the Earth was first covered by plants.

Black Earth Rising' illuminates links between the climate crisis, land, colonization, diasporas, and social and environmental ...

Earth’s storage of water in soil, lakes and rivers is dwindling. And it’s especially bad for farming New research finds that global warming has significantly reduced the amount of water that ...

The formation of these soils dramatically changed life on Earth. Soils altered terrestrial landscapes, water courses, nutrient and mineral cycling and even the composition of the atmosphere. The role ...

CHICAGO — Indigenous people in the Amazon may have been deliberately creating fertile soil for farming for thousands of years. At archaeological sites across the Amazon River basin, mysterious ...

A landmark study into the geological timescale distribution of sediment and nutrients over 500 million years shows that species biodiversity on Earth is driven by landscape dynamics.

Also called biocrust, cryptobiotic soil is a community of tiny, dirt-dwelling organisms that form a distinct crust on the top of soil in arid landscapes.

Plus, in dry earth the gaps between the soil particles are full of air, which has no way of escaping—blocking the water from moving down into the earth.