0 cmSurface
Guymon, Oklahoma Panhandle
Everything below this line is measured, not described.
107 plant records logged within about eight kilometres.
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 ground under
Guymon, Oklahoma Panhandle
36.6828, -101.4816 · keep going ↓
5 cmTopsoil
14.4g/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
32t/haLow
tonnes of organic carbon per hectare, top 30 cm
Typical of long-tilled arable land or disturbed ground, where organic matter has been oxidised away faster than plants could replace it.
The exact spot you searched for is sealed — built over, paved or water — so there is no soil there to model. This reading is from open ground about 4 km away.
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 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
This is the low end of the range on this site, and the comparison to make is Konza Prairie: comparable grassland soil, never ploughed, in the same part of the same continent. The gap between the two figures is roughly what a century of a particular set of decisions costs.
Why this ground
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.
The southern Great Plains were broken out of grass and put under wheat during a wet run of years in the 1910s and 1920s. When the drought arrived in the 1930s the crops failed, and there was nothing holding the soil down — the grass roots that had held it for millennia had been turned under.
The dust storms that followed carried topsoil as far as the eastern seaboard. The Oklahoma Panhandle, around Guymon, was close to the worst of it. The Soil Conservation Service was created in direct response, and shelterbelts and contour ploughing date from that response.
The ground here has been farmed continuously since, much of it irrigated from the Ogallala aquifer. It is worth reading the number alongside Konza Prairie: comparable grassland origin, and a century of very different treatment.
Read this against
Or measure somewhere else