What Lies Beneath

In the summer of 2010, I made the first notes towards a book called Underland, about burial and unburial, deep time and journeys into darkness, which would eventually take almost a decade to write. Last December scientists revealed their discovery of a vast “deep life” ecosystem in the Earth’s crust, twice the volume of the world’s oceans, containing a biodiversity comparable to that of the Amazon, and teeming with 23bn tonnes of micro-organisms – hundreds of times the combined weight of all living humans. For years I travelled to places where the underland deepens drastically or has exerted particular force on the upper world: from bronze age burial complexes in south-west England, to remote Arctic cave-art sites on Norway’s northern coasts, and the blue depths of time archived by the ancient ice of Greenland.

Source: www.theguardian.com