Hardworking ‘Soil Bugs’ Clean the Air
◆ Scientists at the Stanford Research Institute have concluded that soil microorganisms perform an invaluable service in removing deadly carbon monoxide from the atmosphere. Of the 200 different organisms so far isolated from the soils, at least sixteen actively remove this gas. Each year some 200 million tons of “man-made” carbon monoxide are produced in the continental United States. Yet the head of the institute’s plant biology laboratory estimated that the soil in the country can remove more than 500 million tons. And people get the greatest benefits from this service in those areas where trees have not been mostly eliminated and the ground covered with concrete. Thus it seems that these soil microorganisms largely account for the fact that the amount of this gas in the atmosphere has remained almost constant for the past decade.