La prodigiosa vida del subsuelo

There is still an unexplored territory in the world and it is under our feet. From the hand of the American ecologist David Wolfe we visit this unknown and fascinating universe in which most living beings live and where we get food, medical advances and perhaps the hope to fight against climate change.

- Luis Miguel Ariza

David Wolfe dreams of becoming a microscopic underground explorer, that underground layer of just three meters that lies beneath our feet. If in Amazing Journey (1966) Isaac Asimov sent inside the human body an expedition whose crew traveled in a tiny ship through the blood vessels to the last corner of our anatomy, Wolfe believes that the wonders that are underground would leave us equally speechless: "I've talked to filmmakers to make a movie from my book and narrate it from the point of view of an underground traveler who shrinks and tells what he sees." Wolfe, professor of Plant Ecology in the state of New York, is the author of The Underground. A natural history of underground life, which has received praise for showing a world so far unknown.

But what exactly is the subsoil? Why is it important for everything? For starters, there comes the food available in the market. If the Earth were an exclusively rocky planet, without fertile soil on its entire surface, there would be no way to obtain food and humanity would starve to death. Without plants there are no steaks. Such a world would be dominated by bacteria capable of eating stones. It would have a strange and poisonous atmosphere. We tend to think that the planet's greatest biological biodiversity is found in the oceans, but that is only part of the story. The subsoil has the last word. It is the door to the unknown. "Some people think that after two or three meters underground there are almost no living beings, but oil drilling has found abundant microbial life four or five kilometers deep,"