Underground ecosystems are everywhere. From gargantuan lightless mazes to pore-sized bedrock gaps inhabited by microfauna — super tiny animals — these ecosystems are believed to be the most widespread nonmarine environments on the planet, according to a 2019 paper in BioScience. Just like the underwater depths, science still knows precious little about this vast kingdom that all of us, unsuspectingly, live above. And much of what we do know is due to a basic human need: water. Around 99% of the world’s liquid freshwater supply is groundwater: the water held in aquifers and other subterranean spaces. According to the U.N. World Water Development report of 2022, nearly 50% of the world’s urban population currently depends on groundwater, a number that’s likely to rise as the global climate changes. Given this, some scientists are turning their attention to how rising temperatures might impact underground ecosystems themselves. And for that, they’re using the most accessible doorway we have into the world below: caves. From 2019 to 2021, a research team visited 12 caves around continental Europe, the Canary Islands, the Azores archipelago and Guam, all situated in different climate zones, to compare cave temperatures with their respective surfaces. At each location, the scientists installed two temperature data loggers: one in the sediment in the deepest part of the cave, and another in the outdoor soil directly above the same coordinates. The loggers recorded the temperature every two hours over the course of a full year, gathering more than 100,000 measurements. The researchers’…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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