Tales from Underground: A Natural History of Subterranean Life Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Tales from Underground: A Natural History of Subterranean Life Book

Step into your backyard, David Wolfe suggests at the outset of this engaging book, and push your thumb and index finger into the root zone of a patch of grass. The pinch of soil you bring up will be a world of its own: "You will likely be holding," he writes, "close to one billion individual living organisms, perhaps ten thousand distinct species of microbes, most of them not yet named, catalogued, or understood." Scientists are only beginning to comprehend the wealth of life that lies below the earth's surface, observes Wolfe, a soil scientist at Cornell University. Apart from familiar, easily observable subterranean creatures--earthworms, say, or prairie dogs--those scientists have found there progressively tinier forms of life, from "water bears" (tardigrades) and dust mites to microbes whose existence miles below the earth's surface provides keys to the origins of life itself. Noting that the total biomass below the surface may well exceed that above it, Wolfe takes his readers on a learned tour of the subsurface biosphere, layer by layer, mile by mile. What he reports is surprising, and oddly inspiring--for, Wolfe notes, although the human footprint on the soil is deep indeed, and getting deeper, plenty of life occurs beyond our reach. "We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot," Leonardo da Vinci observed five hundred year ago. Wolfe's book helps diminish some of our ignorance, and it is a pleasure to be educated through the course of his pages. --Gregory McNameeRead More

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  • Product Description

    There are over one billion organisms in a pinch of soil, and many of them perform functions essential to all life on the planet. Yet we know much more about deep space than about the universe below. In Tales from the Underground, Cornell ecologist David W. Wolfe takes us on a spectacular tour of this unfamiliar subterranean world, introducing us to the bizarre creatures that live there, as well as the devoted scientists who study them.

    We follow the progress of discovery from Charles Darwin's experiments with earthworms and Lewis and Clark's first encounter with prairie dogs, to the isolation of streptomycin and other antibiotics from the soil and the use of new genetic tools that are revealing an astonishingly rich ecosystem beneath our feet.

    The first stop on this amazing journey takes us deep into the earth's rocky crust, where life may have begun-a world devoid of oxygen and light but safe from asteroid bombardment. The recent discovery of unusual microbes that thrive at these depths today has greatly expanded our notion of earth's biodiversity and has forced us to re-draw the evolutionary tree of life. Many scientists now believe that the total amount of biomass underground exceeds that of the surface. Home to miniscule water bears and microscopic bacteria, mole rats and burrowing owls, the underground reigns supreme.

    Wolfe lifts the veil on this hidden world, revealing for the first time what makes subterranean life so unique-and so precious. Soil creatures work hard for us, producing important pharmaceuticals, recycling life's essential elements, and helping plants gather nutrients from below. But human activities could easily disrupt the delicate balance within the underground. As Wolfe so eloquently explains, the future of our species may well depend on how we manage our living soil resource.

    An original, awe-inspiring journey through a strange realm, Tales of the Underground will forever alter our appreciation of the natural world around-and beneath-us.

  • 0738201286
  • 9780738201283
  • David Wolfe
  • 1 July 2000
  • Perseus Books
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 240
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