You walk on it every day but usually with a floor, a paver or shoes between you and it. You are walking on soil, and you can’t live without it.
Somewhere deep down you know that plants grow in soil and that you eat plants. And so do all the animals that don’t eat each other. So it’s there, this happy plant medium, somewhere in your subconscious.
What you might not know is that soil holds more carbon—the element that is supposed to be neutral—than all surface vegetation and the entire atmosphere put together.
The amounts are measured in gigatons of carbon (GtC), where one GtC is one billion tonnes.
The atmosphere has roughly 875 GtC.
Soil has somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 GtC that includes 1,500 GtC of active soil organic carbon made up of decomposed plant roots, leaf litter, microbes, and stable humus.
Vegetation on land, the plants that feed all the animals, holds between 500 and 600 GtC.
And here is another snippet of information from the Insight Vault you might not know.
Have a great one.