The World Beneath Our Feet

A vivid tour into the subterranean that encourages us to look downwards, revealing how the earth's most biodiverse frontier sustains all life above the soil surface

“The creatures that live in [soil] may lead lives as exciting as those of forest-dwellers, but they are hidden from human sight. Dig them up, though, and the result is awesome.”—The Economist

The ground beneath us hums with a staggering abundance of winding roots, interconnecting fungal networks, wriggling creatures, and mind-blowing microbial life. This hidden ecosystem is the single most biodiverse habitat on the planet. Over half of all the Earth's species exist underfoot, where decaying matter is transformed into new life; just a handful of soil can contain an entire world. Without soil, there would be no life as we know it—and yet we rarely take the time to know the countless lives happening below.

In The World Beneath Our Feet, soil ecologist Frank Ashwood dives deep into this precious ecosystem, spanning the globe from the frozen landscape of Greenland to the black soil deposits of the Amazon and the Eurasian Steppe, while also examining the jaw-dropping evolutionary adaptations that make lives very alien from our own possible. Unearthing soil layers one at a time, Ashwood reveals every sublayer to be a distinct macrocosm, teeming with organisms essential to our planet's wellbeing. Supported by interviews with global soil biologists, as well as his own expert research, Ashwood shows us how life at a microscopic scale impacts us all.

Powerfully illuminating the dark depths of the earth, and accompanied by the author's own up-close photography, which magnifies and reveals creatures only millimeters long, The World Beneath Our Feet opens our eyes to the hidden and wondrous world of soil—perhaps the greatest unexplored frontier on our planet.