Evolution Earth

[Shane] It's only now that we're clocking the extent to which our plant life is reacting to our changing planet... and running with this new understanding, some folks are looking to our grasslands with a new excitement.

[shovel scraping earth] Jane Zelikova is one of those people.

[Jane] There we go.

Nice.

Wow!

Look at that.

[Shane] Jane believes grasslands could be our greatest weapon of defense against climate change.

Once again, the secret is in the soil.

[Jane] Oh!

I love it.

I just want to keep touching it.

[Shane] Jane is a connoisseur.

Full of body, oaky, grassy tones.

Like the way people describe wine, like, I think we could talk about soil that way.

You should put it in a bottle.

People should have a chance to be able to, like, put this in their house and have it smell like this.

So we're lifting up!

[Shane] Not everyone is quite as excited by soil as Jane.

[Jane] Let's get this soil.

[woman] Ready?

She's been traveling across the country, digging holes and analyzing the soil composition in the few remaining undisturbed grasslands.

[Jane] Here she comes!

Here she comes!

Look at how dark it is.

Oh, there she is!

That's really good.

Look at that!

Beautiful!

These are kind of the magical soils that you dream of.

[Shane] She ain't wrong.

They really are something special.

[Jane] It's basically black all the way down.

So dark soil like this probably tells us there's a lot of organic matter in here.

[Shane] This is premium stuff!

[Jane] Ah, man!

The roots here are just prolifically insane.

Like, they're just abundant and deep and... hairy.

What we see above ground is just a small portion of all the biomass.

[Shane] The blades of grass we all see really are just the tip of the iceberg.

[Jane] Actually, the bulk of it is below ground in these roots.

[Shane] Jane's research shows that undisturbed, established grasslands have an immense ability to suck carbon dioxide out of our atmosphere, taking it through the giant network of roots, making the soil a huge reservoir for carbon.

[Jane] The way that you get more carbon in soil is because microbes do this major kind of soil transformation process by taking organic matter that's in the soil, and they transform it by eating it essentially and turning it into carbon, and the bulk of the really long-term kind of carbon that's stored in the soil is actually dead microbes.

We call that necromass.