EcoSphere

Ground at the limit

Yakutsk

Sakha Republic, Russia

Permafrost, where the carbon has been in cold storage since the last ice age and the freezer is failing.

The ground under

Yakutsk, Sakha Republic

62.0355, 129.6755 · keep going ↓

5 cmTopsoil

154.3g/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

58t/haModerate

tonnes of organic carbon per hectare, top 30 cm

The ordinary range for productive farmland and managed gardens in temperate Europe.

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

667 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.

Why this ground

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.

Permanently frozen ground holds an enormous quantity of organic matter — plants and animals that died, were frozen before they could decay, and have stayed that way for tens of thousands of years. Estimates put the northern permafrost store at roughly twice the carbon currently in the atmosphere.

Frozen, it is inert. Thawed, microbes resume work that was interrupted in the Pleistocene. This is the mechanism behind the phrase carbon feedback: warming thaws ground, thawed ground releases carbon, released carbon warms.

Yakutsk sits on continuous permafrost hundreds of metres deep and is one of the coldest cities in the world. Buildings there stand on piles driven into the frozen ground, because a heated building resting on permafrost melts its own foundations.

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