Study: Fungal Networks So Massive They’d Span 10% of the Milky Way

Under your feet is a whole hidden world. While you might see a few mushrooms—the fruiting bodies of fungi—on a walk through the woods, what you can’t see is the vast underground network connecting the plant community. These networks are a vital part of the health of any ecosystem as they facilitate the exchange of nutrients (like phosphorus and nitrogen) and carbon to and from plants. It’s a complex arrangement that we don’t fully understand and that even involves the plants and fungi bargaining with each other. And it’s bigger than we imagined.

These networks are so vast that if you stretched the fungi end-to-end, they would span roughly 10% of the width of the Milky Way, a distance of 68 quadrillion miles.

A new study created a visual map of the density of these arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks based on over 16,000 soil core samples from around the world. Surprisingly, they found these networks were densest in undisturbed grasslands (a rapidly vanishing ecosystem), particularly high-altitude or flooded grasslands (like the Florida Everglades). These networks are so vast that if you stretched the fungi end-to-end, they would span roughly 10% of the width of the Milky Way, a distance of 68 quadrillion miles (if that number seems too big to grasp, that’s because it is—“that’s nearly a billion times the distance of Earth to the sun”!). We can’t comprehend that.

Because of the way these networks exchange nutrients and carbon with plants, they “gobble up vast amounts of carbon.”

One estimate found they take in around 4.3 billion tons (3.9 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide equivalent each year, representing roughly 11% of global fossil fuel emissions in 2021.

This seems important to the modern conversation about climate change, doesn’t it? It’s another reminder of how complex earth is, and how much we don’t know (and we don’t know what we don’t know!).

Even though these fungi are essential to Earth’s health, it wasn’t known how they were distributed around the world. “That’s like saying we know every day 100 million cars move across Earth but we have no idea what road network facilitates that.”

Maybe the reason climate predictions continue to be wrong is: 1) there’s so much we don’t know that isn’t taken into account in models and 2) this climate was designed by God to work for the flourishing of life!

This kind of research is important for understanding more about God’s creation and how we can better steward land (especially agricultural land) to increase these vital fungal networks. But it’s also an incredible reminder of the creativity and wisdom of our God and how interconnected he’s made this world. It’s truly a masterpiece of design.

And don’t forget God’s promise to Noah:

While all the days of the earth remain,
Seedtime and harvest,
And cold and heat,
And summer and winter,
And day and night
Shall not cease. (Genesis 8:22)

God created the earth to be extremely resilient—even in a fallen world.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.