DailyDirt: The Dirt On Soil

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

If you look closely enough at nearly anything, you're bound to find some fascinating details. With the right tools, you can see single-celled organisms are literally everywhere (and viruses are even more ubiquitous). The biodiversity of soil is obviously important to farmers, but there are other interesting things we can find out when we quantify the dirt under our feet. If you've ever wondered what's in dirt, check out these links on soil.

• Soil ecologists checked out some 600 samples of dirt from Manhattan's Central Park and discovered, surprisingly, that the soil contained almost 170,000 different kinds of microbes -- a similar biodiversity to soils found in far less urban locations. These soil researchers also found about 2,000 species of microbes unique to Central Park. [url]
• Prospecting for oil by looking for certain microbes in soil samples is a technique that's been around since the 1930s. With improving biotech, identifying microbes in oil fields could lead to faster and more accurate prospecting for energy-rich deposits. [url]
• There's a lot of life going on in soil (aka the pedosphere) with millions to billions of microbes in each gram of dirt. Additionally, fungi, protozoa, earthworms and nematodes are hopefully thriving in healthy soil that we just see plants growing. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: biodiversity, biology, biosphere, biotech, dirt, ecology, microbes, pedosphere, soil