The Times · https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/fungus-network-underground-x3wqgsrgm
Scientists just drew the first map of the fungal network beneath nearly every plant, a hidden world we'd walked on all along. Ecclesiastes named our not-knowing long ago.
As you don't know the way of the wind, nor how the bones grow in the womb… even so you don't know the work of God who does all.
Ecclesiastes 11:5
Walk across any field and you are standing on top of something almost no one has ever seen. Beneath the grass runs a web of fungal threads, finer than hair, laced through the roots of nearly every plant. It feeds them, moves carbon by the billions of tons, and quietly holds the soil together.
This week, in the journal Science, researchers published the first global map of it, and the scale is hard to take in: something like a hundred and ten quadrillion kilometers of thread, with up to ten meters of it packed into a single teaspoon of dirt. It has been doing this the whole time we have been walking around up here, and we are only now learning how to look at it.
There is an old, clear-eyed line in Ecclesiastes about exactly this kind of moment. The writer admits he does not know how the wind finds its path, or how a child's bones knit together in the womb, and then he draws his honest conclusion: you don't know the work of God who does all. He is not anxious about the gap in his knowledge. He is simply naming its size.
So the next time you cross a lawn or a field, picture it down there under your shoes, the whole quiet tangle of it, getting on with its work without the slightest interest in being seen. The fungi were there all along. We were just the last to find out. Which makes you wonder what else is holding things up down where we never think to look, busy whether we notice or not.