the.com/soil
the original internet, where one teaspoon holds more living things than there are humans alive
means The loose top layer of earth in which plants grow, made of minerals, organic matter, water, air, and a vast living community of microbes and creatures.
from From Old French 'soil,' meaning ground or land, drawn from Latin 'solum' — the floor, the base, the bottom of things, the very ground you stand on. There's an old tangle here: the Latin 'solium' (a seat or throne) and 'solea' (the sole of a shoe) hover nearby and may have muddied the word's growth, so 'soil' ends up meaning the earth beneath your feet in more ways than one.
- tiny multitudes
- One gram can hold billions of organisms
- slow build
- One inch takes centuries to form
- carbon vault
- Holds more carbon than air and plants combined
- antibiotic source
- Penicillin and most antibiotics came from soil microbes
- finite resource
- A third of Earth's soil is already degraded
chernozem — black earth covering 160 million hectares across ukraine, russia, and kazakhstan
terra preta — anthropogenic dark soil in amazon basin created by pre-columbian civilizations
laterite — iron-rich tropical soil mined commercially in australia, guinea, and brazil for bauxite