EcoSphere

Ground made of carbon

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.

The ground under

Bargerveen, Drenthe

52.6839, 7.0264 · keep going ↓

5 cmTopsoil

177.2g/kg

grams of organic carbon per kilogram of soil

The living layer: dead leaves, roots, bacteria, and the fungal threads that bind them into crumbs. Almost everything that happens to soil carbon happens here first.

30 cmThe stock

79t/haHigh

tonnes of organic carbon per hectare, top 30 cm

Approaching what settled grassland and mature woodland hold, where roots and fungal networks have been left undisturbed for decades.

ISRIC — World Soil Information

Modelled at 250-metre resolution from global soil surveys, and read from SoilGrids on 2026-09-01. SoilGrids publishes in versioned releases rather than continuously, so this figure is the current one until they publish again.

deeperThe network

4,630 fungal records near here

Each one is a specimen somebody found and wrote down. The species below are only the ones that fruit visibly; the threads that do the work almost never appear above ground at all.

GBIF — Global Biodiversity Information Facility

Each name links to the original record, with its collector, date and dataset.

Reading this figure

The figure above is carbon stock over the top thirty centimetres, and that is the wrong depth for peat. Peat here runs metres deep, so a reading taken from the first thirty centimetres of it captures a small fraction of what is actually stored and reports a peatland as though it were ordinary soil. Read it as a floor, not a total: the comparison it supports is with the other places on this site measured the same way, not with what is underneath this one.

Why this ground

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.

Almost all of the Netherlands' raised bog was cut for fuel. Bargerveen survives because commercial extraction was halted while a remnant was still intact, and it is now managed to hold water rather than shed it.

A raised bog is stranger than a marsh. It grows upward above the surrounding water table, fed only by rain, and its own dead material forms the sponge that keeps it wet. That makes it self-sustaining while it is whole and very difficult to restore once it is not.

Read the number here against a Dutch polder a few dozen kilometres west. Same country, same rainfall, entirely different ground.

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Or measure somewhere else