Places
A number means nothing until it has something to sit beside.
The search box will read the ground under anywhere OpenStreetMap has mapped. These 17 are the ones worth reading first — each is here because it demonstrates something the others do not, and several of them are best understood in pairs.
Ground made of carbon
Peat is plant matter that never finished rotting, because water kept the air out. It is the densest carbon store on land, and it only holds while it stays wet.
The Flow Country
Caithness and Sutherland, Scotland
The largest blanket bog in Europe, and the reason a wet, treeless, apparently empty landscape is one of Britain's largest carbon stores.
The Fens
Cambridgeshire, England
Drained peat that has been sinking for three centuries — measured, not estimated, against an iron post driven down to the clay.
Bargerveen
Drenthe, the Netherlands
The last fragment of a raised bog that once crossed the Dutch–German border, kept because the cutting stopped just in time.
Sebangau
Central Kalimantan, Indonesia
Tropical peat swamp forest, where the carbon is metres deep and the fires that release it burn underground.
Ground built by grass
Deep-rooted grassland puts carbon down rather than up. The richest agricultural soils on Earth were made this way, over thousands of years, and can be spent in a century.
Konza Prairie
Flint Hills, Kansas, United States
Tallgrass prairie that was never ploughed, because the rock underneath made it impossible — the control group for a whole continent.
Poltava
Ukraine
The chernozem belt — black earth up to a metre deep, made by steppe grass over thousands of years.
Pergamino
Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
The Pampas, where no-till farming went from experiment to the default across an entire agricultural region.
Ground under old trees
In an undisturbed forest most of the carbon is not in the trees. It is underneath them, in fungal networks and in the litter they never finish breaking down.
Białowieża Forest
Podlaskie, Poland
The last large fragment of the lowland forest that once covered the European plain, with a floor that has never been cleared.
Hoh Rainforest
Olympic Peninsula, Washington, United States
Temperate rainforest with three to four metres of rain a year, where dead trees are the seedbed for the next ones.
Ground that is worked
Every farmed soil is a running experiment in how fast carbon can be lost or put back. Some of these places have been measuring the answer for over a century.
Rothamsted
Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England
The longest-running agricultural experiment in the world, on plots that have been treated the same way since 1843.
Guymon
Oklahoma Panhandle, United States
Near the centre of the Dust Bowl, where ploughing grassland in a dry decade removed the topsoil into the sky.
The Loess Plateau
Yan'an, Shaanxi, China
Wind-blown silt hundreds of metres deep, farmed for millennia, eroded catastrophically, and then partly restored.
Zinder
Niger
Sahelian farmland where the trees came back — not by planting, but by farmers letting what was already in the ground grow.
Flevoland
Lelystad, the Netherlands
Some of the youngest agricultural soil on Earth: seabed until the middle of the twentieth century, farmland since.
Ground at the limit
Soil that is frozen, or new, or so dry that almost nothing lives in it. The edges of the range explain the middle of it.
Yakutsk
Sakha Republic, Russia
Permafrost, where the carbon has been in cold storage since the last ice age and the freezer is failing.
San Pedro de Atacama
Antofagasta, Chile
The driest non-polar desert on Earth — and a reading that comes back higher than the Dust Bowl, which is the most interesting number on this site.
Hekla
Southern Iceland
Volcanic ash soils that hold carbon unusually well, on an island that lost most of its topsoil to erosion.