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Rainforest Tundra Desert Saltwater Freshwater

Mountain's Majesty
One-fifth of the Earth's land surface is mountains. But only one in 10 people live in these rugged and beautiful places. Until just a few decades ago, the secrets of making mountains were largely a mystery. Geologists could make sense of how volcanoes build themselves higher with their own lava, but how do ocean sediments end up on top of the Andes of South America? It was the theory of plate tectonics accepted by geologists in the 1960s that finally provided some sensible answers. Simply put, where the rafts, or plates, of Earth's brittle crust collide, that's where most mountains tend to be. It's also where most of the earthquakes, volcanoes and other geological violence tend to gang up and make a ruckus. The Himalayan Range, for instance, is growing every day as the Indian Plate continues to smash north into the much larger Asian Plate. The rumpled, contorted rocks of the collision form the highest mountain range on the planet. Among those rocks are old ocean sediments right up at the very summit of Mount Everest. Just like in the Andes. What Goes Up ... But as sure as they rise, rain, ice and snow are tearing mountains down. That's the irony of being a mountain on planet Earth: the higher a mountain reaches, the more clouds gather round its heights, dumping rain and snow on it to erode it away. The Appalachians were once a towering mountain range. But because the tectonic collision that pushed them up ended long ago, the old range is slowly melting away. The Himalayas are putting up a better fight. The Indian monsoons wear them down, but the ongoing collision of plates keeps pushing the mountains up as well and so a balance has been struck. The flip side to all this mountain weather is that it feeds glaciers and fills rivers with just about all the freshwater on the planet. By forcing air to rise into chillier altitudes, mountains force water vapor to condense and deposit rain or snow on the land. All that water eventually feeds the rivers, lakes and streams that sustain our crops and provide water to cities and industries.

Mountains also come down more violently. Avalanches are an extreme danger in some mountainous regions. The worst are in places where old layers of rock are tilted downslope and then lubricated with water. Volcanoes can also blow themselves apart in an instant as was seen when Mount St. Helens literally lost its top in 1980.

Penetrating Deep Oceans

The deep sea seems almost to belong to another planet. Bizarre, little understood creatures live there in perpetual darkness and under mountainous pressures vampire squids, sawtooth eels, sea spiders. They and many others have largely eluded science or appear for a tantalizing moment before the headlamps of submersibles only to vanish again. Despite decades of exploration, less than a tenth of the deep ocean realm has been explored, despite it being the largest habitat for life on Earth. There are a lot of sea monsters yet to be discovered. The deep sea is invisible to anyone on a ship, of course. It's just the open ocean. But there are subtle signs even on the surface that great depths lie below. Creatures like great whales, albatrosses, tuna and sharks may be seen. But no sea gulls, harbor seals or otters are found in these expanses. To live in this part of the ocean, an animal has to swim all the time. There is no place to rest or hide from natural enemies. The Abyss Technically speaking, the deep sea is any place away from coasts and beyond the continental shelves where the seafloor drops away to extreme depths miles deep. These vast regions were once considered lifeless or perhaps inhabited by monstrous squids and little else. Explorers using remotely operated submersible vehicles have begun to penetrate these dark depths, and they have discovered bizarre gardens rife with life around smoking hydrothermal vents. The gardens host entire communities of life that never see the sun and have no need of it. Giant tube worms, clams and shrimp live all around these "black smoker" vents, surviving off the exotic primitive "archaea," bacteria-like organisms that extract a living from the chemicals dissolved in the hot mineral-rich waters spewing from the seafloor. The minerals that come out of the smoker vents are not only of interest to sea life. Humans are preparing to mine the thick crusts created by the vents for their gold, silver and copper. Some geologists suspect that all the major copper deposits now found on land are actually the fossilized remains of deep sea smoker vents. Already mineral rights have been granted to a company to look for metal-rich lodes over 1,500 square miles (4,000 square kilometers) of the

Bismarck Sea, north of New Guinea, according to a report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But even far from these extraordinary gardens, also under more than 10,000 feet of water, the muddy expanses of the seafloor can still harbor animals like sea urchins and shrimp that live off the debris that slowly descends from the more productive waters high above. There have even been discoveries of deep-sea corals growing on ledges of rock 650 to 5,000 feet deep off the Atlantic coast of Canada in cold waters a far cry from what most people think of when they hear the words "coral reef." Poison Zones Unfortunately, the old idea that the deep sea is lifeless has led to a long history of dumping some of the most toxic waste into the seas. Though now illegal, not long ago everything from sewage sludge to drums of radioactive waste were dumped into the deep sea. Hydrocarbons from ocean drilling operations are still a source of deep-sea pollution. According to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), dumping accounts for about 10 percent of all pollution to the deep sea. The top source of pollution is runoff from land (44 percent), followed by air pollution (33 percent) and losses from shipping (12 percent). Offshore oil and gas exploration and production adds about 1 percent more of toxic chemicals usually concentrated in areas like the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea, where they cause a far greater proportion of the deep-sea pollution. Global Storehouse The deep sea also plays another role often overlooked in the operation of Earth: storing heat. Seawater that is warmed at the surface eventually becomes dense with salts and sinks into the deep sea. There it retains heat that can take centuries to come again to the surface. This is a critical concern regarding global warming, since the only way to truly cool down Earth is to expel the heat trapped by the greenhouse effect into space. That's harder to do when the heat is trapped in the deep sea and taking its time coming up again. Finally, there's the matter of carbon dioxide, the most notorious greenhouse gas. Microscopic ocean plants account for about half of all the carbon dioxide-absorbing photosynthesis on the planet. A lot of the carbon trapped by sea life near the surface eventually drops to the seafloor and is buried there sequestered away from the atmosphere and out of the global warming equation for a long time. Without this giant carbon dioxide sink, the gas would increase faster in the atmosphere and global warming would accelerate even more quickly than it already is. So no matter how otherworldly the deep sea may seem, it is actually an essential part of life everywhere on planet Earth.

Deserted Land
Upon hearing the word "desert" most people conjure up images of lots of sand and heat. It's a common misconception. Some deserts are blazing hot and others happen to be the coldest, least sandy places on Earth, like Antarctica, for instance, or the frigid Gobi Desert of China. About the only thing all deserts have in common is their lack of abundant and reliable water. They are dry. That, as the word implies, makes them some of the most open, treeless, deserted lands in the world. And because they are already living on the edge, the habitats of desert animals and plants also tend to be among the most easily disrupted, according to desert researchers. Desert Recipe In the simplest terms, a desert can be defined as anyplace where the rain- or snowfall is less than the rate that things dry up. As to why they exist at all, one need look no further than a satellite image of Earth, or a world map with all the major deserts highlighted, to see that there's a method to the planet's deserts: The majority of desert lands fall inside two bands north and south of the tropics, at midlatitudes. The reason for this is atmospheric. It starts in the tropics where there the sun beats down ferociously and evaporates a lot of water, causing the thunderheads to pile up. As that warmed air reaches higher altitudes, it cools and rains out its moisture, then is pushed toward the poles by global air currents. This dried-out air tends to cycle back down over the midlatitudes where it creates high-pressure systems. High-pressure systems result in fair, dry weather, as any meteorologist can attest, whereas low-pressure systems spawn storms. Another thing that grows deserts is the rain shadow effect, which is created by mountains blocking wet weather from inland areas. When a storm has to climb a mountain, its air cools with the higher altitude and produces more rain and snow dumping the moisture on the mountains. By the time the air makes it to the desert, it's squeezed dry. Some desert areas have multiple mountain ranges blocking moisture, like Death Valley, in California, which is cut off from Pacific Ocean storms by no less than three mountain ranges.

Other deserts are behind only one range, but they are real doozies: the Atacama of Peru, which is behind the Andes, and the Tibetan Plateau and Gobi, which are behind the gigantic Himalayas. A third ingredient for a desert is cool water offshore if an ocean is nearby, that is. Cold currents, like those off the western United States, western and southern Australia, or southwestern Africa, don't tend to spawn summer rainstorms, and they keep coastal and interior areas dry. It's the opposite case along the Atlantic Coast of the U.S., which has very warm waters from the Gulf Stream. The warm, moist air makes for muggy summers and wetter winters as well. Wastelands Finally, humans have long played a role in making deserts, but not the kind that are particularly good for wildlife or people. Many human activities can degrade marginal lands, i.e., those that are nearly deserts, and drive them over the edge. "Good examples include land degradation as a result of vegetation loss due to grazing and/or drought," says Nicholas Lancaster, researcher and director of the Center for Arid Lands Environmental Management at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev. His list of most desert-degrading human activities is topped by surface disturbance by off-road vehicles and animals, increasing salinity of agricultural lands due to poor irrigation practices, scarce water resources, and overuse of surface water and groundwater, and urbanization of growing populations. Overgrazing of animals and poor agricultural practices, both of which cause massive soil loss and erosion, takes about 12 million hectares of marginal lands out of use every year, according to an online report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). This is not only bad for desert wildlife, but it's a human tragedy. Some examples: Since 1965, degradation of already marginal lands on the edge of the Sahara Desert forced one-sixth of the people of Burkina Faso and Mali to flee to cities. Between 1965 and 1988, in Mauritania, the proportion of nomads who grazed animals on the land fell from 73 percent to 7 percent, while the population of the capital city Nouakchott shot up from 9 percent to 41 percent, according to AAAS. Global warming is also making itself known in the American deserts. The mysterious die-off of vast stands of pion trees the source of pine nuts valued by humans and wildlife may be from hotter summers in the higher elevation deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. The warming climate is also tinkering with where, when and how much rain falls in deserts, although the specifics are still unclear. Some desert regions may get greener. Others may experience droughts that last for decades potentially drying up entire cities. Good News But there is good news. Some marginal lands that were thought to be on the verge have been brought back from the brink. One example is the Machakos District in Kenya. In the 1930s, it

was thought to be a lost cause. But over the decades, despite a population explosion, water and soil conservation measures have improved the land. These measures include cutting hillside terraces to stop soil erosion and digging water-storage ponds, according to work by Mary Tiffin of Drylands Research in the United Kingdom. New farming methods have also helped in densely populated, semi-arid areas of northern Nigeria, according to Tiffin and her colleagues. So, even though many deserts are becoming a lot less deserted, there's no reason they have to become wastelands as well.

Ice Worlds From Top to Bottom

The expression the ends of the Earth is never better applied than to the poles. They are truly the least hospitable regions on the surface of the planet beating out some pretty hot, arid or just simply starved and deserted places. Some parts of Earth's polar regions are so frigid and harsh, in fact, they resemble Mars more than Earth, which is why some Mars enthusiasts spend time there, practicing for a manned mission to the real Red Planet. The deep chill is, of course, largely why the poles are the least populated regions of Earth. There are no permanent human residents of Antarctica, and about 3.7 million Arctic residents are spread out over eight countries. That's about the same population as Connecticut, Ireland or Lithuania. Not a lot as populations go by today's standards. Geometry of Frigid The frozen poles are no accident, of course. They are a product of our spherical planet. The cold is the fault of geometry: The sun is low in the sky at high latitudes, which means that even at noontime shadows are still long and sunlight is spread thinly over a lot of ground. In stark contrast, at the equator a person casts a shadow on little more than their own feet. Sunlight strikes the ground at the equator perpendicularly delivering a lot of energy to a small patch of ground. The low angle of the polar sun, combined with the tilt in Earth's spin axis, also give polar regions the greatest range of daylight hours through the year. At one extreme is midsummer when the sun never sets; at the other are midwinter nights when the sun never rises. Again, that's the exact opposite of the equator, where the sun is always high in the sky and days are all virtually the same: 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark. These extremes make for some very different creatures. It is eternal spring in the tropics. Seasons there revolve around wet and dry, not cold and hot. The excess of energy in the tropics creates layer upon layer of life, forests with multiple canopies and birds with spectacular plumage.

Meanwhile, winter never really leaves the poles. It's always either cold or very cold. To live here means either sleeping most of the year or piling on the blubber. There isn't a lot of time or energy to spare for bright colors or elaborate displays. Seals, penguins, polar bears, Arctic whales and tundra plants aren't particularly flashy. That's not what it takes to survive at the top and bottom of the world. Melt Mystery Despite a large and growing interest in polar regions by scientists and the public, they are remarkably mysterious and difficult places to study. Take the Arctic sea ice, for instance. It's been in the news a lot lately because over the years it's been covering less and less of the Arctic Ocean in summertime. The sea ice is shrinking and getting thinner as well. The latest study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research estimates that the Arctic Sea will have ice-free summers by the year 2040 because of global warming. But the exact mechanism causing the melting of the ice is still up for grabs. Some researchers think it's warmer water moving up through the Bering Strait and melting the ice from below. Other scientists suspect a combination of air temperature and a vicious cycle of dark, open waters absorbing more solar energy than ice, and therefore perpetuating more open water. Either way, the situation is expected to accelerate as the ever thinner ice simply crumbles. Megadune Mega-Mystery Another mystery that's a lot less worrisome but nonetheless puzzling is the megadunes of Antarctica. Unlike dunes made from snow, the Antarctic megadunes are broad, undulating waves in the surface of an ice sheet. The dunes are 6.5 to 13 feet (2 to 4 meters) high and one to three miles (two to five kilometers) apart. They were first spotted by pilots, but satellite images revealed vast areas covered by the dunes some as large as the entire state of California. The features are too large to be seen from the ground. Scientists have tried to explain the dunes in various ways including some strange atmospheric processes that sound more like they belong on Mars or Pluto than Earth. But since they are pretty hard to visit and even harder to see being made, no explanation has taken hold. Climatic Canary What polar researchers can say for certain is that the polar regions are feeling global warming more acutely than the rest of the world. Polar animals and plants that have evolved to live on ice or permafrost already feel the heat because their lifestyles depend on one critical number: 32 degrees F (0 degrees C). Above that number their way of life is threatened or nonexistent. As the global climate heats up, there will be fewer and fewer places for cold-region creatures to hide.

Sheltering Shallow Seas

It's the ocean next door, i.e., the shallow seas that the vast majority of ocean life calls home. Shallow seas are rich with coral reefs, mangrove swamps, kelp forests and sea-grass plains, and include open waters off icy islands, thick with penguins, krill and whales. The shallow ocean realms are the rain forests of the sea vital to capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and expelling oxygen. They are also where we get the vast majority of our seafood and, paradoxically, the part of the oceans that get the most polluted runoff from human activities on land. These waters are also where whales come to give birth and suckle their young. Whether it's humpbacks off the Hawaiian Islands or gray whales off the coast of Baja California, shallow bays and the waters near islands provide shelter for some of the most impressive marine mammals found anywhere on the planet. Lights, Nutrients ... Action! What makes shallow seas explosively alive is that they are at the intersection of two worlds: outer space and the deep ocean. Outer space starts right above sea level, at least from a fish's point of view. It's where the light from the sun is strongest and able to illuminate the upper 100 feet or so of water. The deep ocean waters, on the other hand, see no sunlight, but they contain nutrients galore. The only thing the nutrients need is the light and a few tiny ocean plants to kick-start an entire ecosystem. The key is getting that nutrient-rich water to the surface. Along coasts and islands the rising seafloor and stormy weather above do the trick. Winds stir surface waters and create mixing currents that run deep and bring the deep waters up. Once those nutrients are in the sunlit upper waters, the nutrients are fertilizer for a burst of phytoplankton life the base of the entire ocean food chain. At the top of that food chain are great white sharks and humpback whales, dolphins and seals, penguins and, of course, humans. Protection But coral reefs, mangrove swamps and other shallow-water habitats are more than just good places to get food. They also protect coastlines where most people live. In places along the Sri

Lankan coast, for instance, where corals have been illegally mined, the great Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 had no trouble barreling right into shore, taking lives and destroying property. Coral-protected areas saw much less trouble. Then there's the Orissa Coast of India, where salt-tolerant mangrove trees were stripped away to make room for shrimp farms. In 1999, the storm swells from a cyclone, normally stopped by the mangroves, roared inland and drowned an estimated 10,000 people. With the majority of humanity living in coastal areas, the value of natural systems protecting the land is incalculable. More than a quarter of Earth's tropical coastlines are protected by mangroves, but that number is shrinking. Since mangroves also serve as a natural sewage filter and home to many kinds of commercially valuable marine life, many conservationists are calling for more action to protect them from development. Coral reefs are also facing challenges. Some have survived in place for more than 2 million years. The fish from coral reefs feed a billion people each year. However, the very same reefs are facing a triple threat: 1) destructive, unsustainable fishing methods, 2) coastal development and 3) global warming. Hopeful Signs Coral animals, for all their tropical charm, don't really like very warm water. Global warming can cause waters to get too warm for some corals. They "bleach" and die. But some species may be able to survive. One recent study of corals in Hawaii found at least one coral species that bleaches which means it loses its symbiotic algae but survives by switching to eating plankton for a living. Yet another study in the Caribbean of fossilized corals show them to be the same species that are alive today despite evidence of many very warm water periods in between. Perhaps corals are more resilient than we think. Mangroves, though severely damaged and reduced worldwide, are getting renewed local support, as well as international attention. Ecuador, for instance, even provides incentives for shrimp farmers to restore mangroves. In Bangladesh, villagers are employed by the government to plant mangroves in mudflats. These efforts have a long way to go to counteract a long history of destruction, but they are a good beginning.

Flat, Grassy, Great Plains

Christopher Columbus was wrong: The Earth is flat, at least in places. There are seemingly endless expanses of open ground, flat as the mind can imagine, found on every continent. Sometimes they are covered with grasses, ice or low shrubs that dot the land like stubble on a vast expanse of dry skin. The great plains of Earth are truly the oceans of the land. And like the seas, it's the little green plants that make most of them work. Grasses are at the center of food webs that include rabbits, buffalo, yaks, camels, wolves and many other animals that live today on plains, or disappeared just a few thousand years ago the blink of an eye in the history of the planet. Lost Seas The secret to making plains differs with the plain. The easiest way to get a plain, however, is to build it underwater. This is where the Great Plains of North America got started. More than 70 million years ago these plains were the bottom of a shallow sea. That sea had spent about 500 million years collecting sediments from 5,000 to 10,000 feet (1,500 to 3,000 meters) deep from land to the east and west. It made for a very flat, soft seabed that stretched for thousands of miles. The uplift of that land since then hasn't changed its basically flat character. But as dry land it was new territory and habitat that helped evolve some strange creatures like the Titanotheres, giant creatures with huge horns on their snouts. These lived 37 to 22 million years ago alongside herds of camels, rhinoceroses, tapirs and horses, which are still found elsewhere in the world. The Great Plains today stretch from Mexico and Texas, north into Canada 3.2 million square miles (8.3 million square kilometers) in all. Before Europeans came to North America, the Great Plains were vast open grasslands between the western end of the great Atlantic forests and the Rocky Mountains. They were too dry for trees, except in the lowest spots where water can collect. Grasses took over and made a fine home for the great American bison, or buffalo, upon which many Native American tribes depended.

No Easter Bunny Among the things we can thank another vast plain for is the "Easter Bunny," indirectly. Bunnies of any kind, actually. It was on the plains of Mongolia in northern China that these beloved grass eaters evolved more than 20 million years ago. Lagomorphs, as these animals are called, evolved to eat the grass, and drove the evolution of a set of smaller carnivores, like foxes and eagles, that specialize in prey this size. In all, the grassland plains of Inner Mongolia, China, encompass 306,000 square miles (792,000 square kilometers), forming a 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) swath of grass across Central Asia. They support tens of millions of livestock animals in addition to wildlife.

Flat, Grassy, Great Plains

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Ice Age Arctic tundra is another kind of plain. Deep sheets of ice covered the land during ice ages, scouring the surface flat. In frigid areas of the planet, tundra, characterized by thick, black mud and permanently frozen subsoil, dominates the landscape. Trees won't grow in a tundra, but a lack of water isn't to blame. It's the frozen ground. Even in the summer the sun thaws only a few inches of soil, leaving the permafrost below the surface hard as stone. This frozen layer of earth does not absorb moisture well, so water runs off it like it does a rock. Not particularly welcoming to tree roots. Mostly a few short grasses, mosses, lichens and heath grow in the tundra in the short summers.

It's a Zoo Out There Of course, all plains vary in the animals and plants that inhabit them. There are the yaks, pika and Tibetan foxes of the highest plain in the world, the Tibetan Plateau. Not very far away, just over the Himalayas, are the pygmy hogs, elephants and towering grasses of the Long Grass Plains of India. Two plains with very different inhabitants. Then there's South America's 290,000-square-mile (750,000-square-kilometer) Pampas of Argentina that once ran wild with rheas, nutrias, vizcachas, opossums and the endangered Pampas deer. Across the Atlantic there are lions, zebras and elephants on the African savannah another plain and more variety still on the South African veldt. Threats One of the greatest threats to the plains of Earth is climate change. A climate shift that sends more water to an arid plain, or warmth to tundra plains, would make those places more hospitable to trees, which would, in turn, dramatically change the rest of the flora and fauna. On the other hand, should climate change bring less rain to the Great Plains or the Mongolian grasslands, it could lead to a permanent "dust bowl" condition. That would be an economic, environmental and humanitarian disaster. At the moment, climate modelers haven't honed their predictions to say for sure what will happen. The only thing certain is a change will occur. Oddly enough, many of these plains may contain the seeds to their own salvation. Recently biologists in Minnesota have discovered that when native prairie grasses are allowed to grow on depleted farmlands, the soils starts gaining carbon pretty quickly even of the grasses that are mowed which mimics grazing by buffalo or prairie fires by cutting away the upper part of the plant. What's even more compelling is that the mowed grass can then be fermented and made into ethanol that can run cars and electrical generators. That means these grasses offer a fuel that is "carbon-negative," i.e., it lowers the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and fights global warming. Not even corn ethanol can make that kind of climate-friendly claim. What's more, in areas where prairie grasses are allowed to grow instead of cash crops, wildlife is also coming back prairie chickens, pheasants and mule deer, for instance. The plains, it seems, may someday save not only themselves, but the planet.

To Know a Jungle is to Love a Jungle

There is, perhaps, no scene that conjures the word "primordial" more than that of a shadowy, steamy jungle. There are mysteries hidden everywhere, otherworldly screams, camouflaged predators, noxious plants, stinging bugs, mold, decay and boggy impassable ground. It is, in the minds of many, the very thing civilization was invented to fend off. Most of that sentiment comes from lack of familiarity with jungles, which are also called tropical rain forests. To know a jungle, it turns out, is to love it. And there's the rub: Jungles are not easy to know. They are incredibly complex places, with most of their life in the leafy, limb-filled spaces above the ground. Humans did not evolve in a place like this, though native people have shown that humans can adapt to it and live well if they learn the ways of the jungle. Packed With Life The jungles of the world are jam-packed with species, despite covering only a few percent of Earth's land area. They are the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. From New Guinea to Costa Rica to the Amazon and Africa, jungles can contain many hundreds of species of plants and animals in just an acre. But diversity isn't their only asset. Jungles protect land from erosion, generate rainfall by cooling the air above them, protect soils, prevent floods and contribute to groundwater supplies. To people who live in them, jungles also provide fruit, nuts, medicines, meat and shelter materials in perpetuity that far exceeds the onetime profit made by cutting down all the trees and selling the lumber. This is a fact that's becoming better understood worldwide. Despite the growing appreciation for rain forests, of the ten percent of the world's wooded lands that were cleared from 1970 to 1995, most were in the tropics. Between 1990 and 1995, trees came down in the greatest numbers in Latin America, with Africa and Asia right behind. The worst deforestation tends to happen in countries with both lots of trees and dense populations, like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Jamaica and the Philippines.

Besides demands for timber, fuel wood, charcoal and wood pulp, there is also a high demand for farmland in these countries. So the jungles are cleared. Hope for Jungles Things are not entirely bleak for the jungles, however. In the early 1990s, the world finally came together to stop the destruction. The need for timber harvesters to start using sustainable practices was made crystal clear by huge boycotts by consumers of tropical woods. By the end of the decade, more than 36 million acres of jungle had been certified sustainable by the international Forest Stewardship Council. What's more, certified timber sells for more. Other arguments have also been used to protect the jungles. Their ability to absorb carbon dioxide, for instance, helps to fight the greenhouse effect and global warming. There is also the hidden pharmaceutical and biodiversity value of jungles. Nature has spent millions of years making a dizzying array of jungle organisms, which produce an innumerable number of complex bioactive compounds that could do wonders for human health if only we had time to discover and study them. Finally, there is inherent value in primordial jungle for itself. The fantastic array of life found in jungles, however unwelcome to most humans, offers something no human creation can ever match the most complex show of interacting life on the planet. To many, that is not only intellectually stimulating and spiritually refreshing, but far too rich a treasure and too long in the making to be sacrificed for a few more cords of timber.

Freshwater: Earth's Life Force

Imagine an entire planet where the universe's finest liqueur is boiled out of fermenting seas by a brilliant yellow star, distilled in the skies and rained back down on the land, forming lakes and rivers of the inebriating brew. The planet, of course, is Earth, and the liqueur is freshwater. Without freshwater Earth's land masses would be barren, the continents might be in different locations, mountains would be far taller, and life virtually impossible. Earth's very character and appearance are the result of the planet being fairly drunk on this precious grog. Liquid Destroyer Luckily for us land animals, Earth can't help but make freshwater. It happens when the sun heats and evaporates water from the oceans. The salts and other minerals are left behind, creating pure water vapor in the air. As it is carried higher to cooler air, it condenses and makes clouds, which can produce rain or snow when forced higher over land. That's the water cycle, of course. It's something taught to every schoolchild for good reason. Not only does the water cycle give us the water we drink and use to grow food, it is also the carver of coastlines, sculptor of mountains and the burier of seas. It might even play a critical role in plate tectonics, the process that keeps creating and destroying crustal plates that make up the surface of the planet. One of the more dramatic examples of what a few gazillon raindrops and snowflakes of freshwater can do over time is the Grand Canyon. Over the past 5 million years, the Colorado River has just as steadily cut its way through the constantly bulging Colorado Plateau, making the mile-deep, 18-mile-wide, 200-mile-long Grand Canyon along the way. By moving such gigantic masses of rock from one place to another, freshwater also removes weight from the Earth's crust in one place and weighs down others. By wearing away rocks of the Himalaya, for instance, rain and snow make the mountains lighter and actually speed up the

rate at which the range buoys upward on the more plastic layer below the crust the zone called the mantle. In turn, by affecting the pressure in the mantle, it's thought by some geophysicists that currents can be generated in the mantle that influence how, when and where tectonic plates move. This top-down theory to what drives plate tectonics makes freshwater a central player in the making of every inch of Earth's surface today. Watery Creator But freshwater does far more than move rocks around. Some of Earth's most unusual and beautiful living landscapes are created and kept thriving by freshwater. The verdant and little explored Tepuis of Venezuela, for instance, are islands in the sky, loaded with species found nowhere else. These plateaus and mountains are perpetually bathed in freshwater. In this unique ecoregion, it's virtually always raining or socked in by thick, moisture-laden clouds. Life in such torrentially wet places evolves to take quick advantage of their decaying neighbors. Wait too long, for instance, and the next downpour will wash away what nutrients there are. In such a place, mold, fungus and large trees with broad, shallow roots form the basis of the food chain. Downstream from these water-rich places, forests and other highland rivers fill broad basins with forest waste and worn rock, piling up tens of thousands of feet of mud and silt for millions of years. The Mississippi River sediments deposited along the Gulf Coast are now so heavy that they are squeezing Earth's mantle. The sedimentation is believed to be one of the reasons New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana are subsiding and becoming more vulnerable to hurricanes and sea level rise. Grace of Water Despite its great influence, all the freshwater that makes up the lakes, rivers, streams, creeks, marshes, potholes, bogs, fens, mires, swamps, ponds, billabongs, lagoons, mud holes and groundwater of Earth has only recently been accounted for. Monitoring where water goes is a big job and can only really be done affordably for the entire planet from space. NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites do this task by measuring local changes in gravity over time. All matter including water has mass and gravity. So when there's less water in a particular area, its gravity is slightly less. More water whether in lakes, streams or underground means the gravity is greater. GRACE has now managed to watch as the continents swell and shrink with water on a seasonal basis showing Earth's water cycle actually at work on a global scale. Bad & Good News Freshwater, however, is in trouble. Human activities have polluted and depleted freshwater in many parts of the world. Wetlands have been drained to build and farm on. Nutrient levels in many rivers and streams are so high from sewage, agricultural and industrial runoff, air pollution, and erosion that they are choked and starved of oxygen bad news for fish and invertebrates that make for healthy streams and lakes.

The good news is that conservationists have succeeded in protecting more than 800 of the world's most vital wetlands all over the globe. It's even profitable. A 1991 study by the International Institute for Environment and Development found that a wetland in the arid north of Nigeria provided 30 times more profit from fish, firewood, cattle grazing and natural crops than if the water had been diverted to a large agricultural project. That's freshwater for you it's heady stuff.

Forests: Towering Trees, Falling Leaves

If any one landscape on Earth has proved more useful to humanity it may be the forests. They have provided lumber for homes and ships, firewood, food, medicines, and a plethora of folk stories and deities. But forests' usefulness has been their undoing. Many of the world's great forests are either much reduced by logging or on their way. North America's forests once stretched nearly the length of the continent, north to south, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the edge of the Great Plains. Likewise, Ireland and England were heavily wooded islands. You wouldn't know to look at them today. In fact, few places on Earth retain any virgin forests. Evergreen Ocean The tsar of all forests on Earth is the taiga. It circles the planet from Sweden to Siberia to Alaska and Canada. It's a cold, evergreen forest that is the largest single terrestrial biological zone on the planet. It's where most of the world's trees live and it's populated almost entirely by evergreen species. Taiga is also a vast player in the seasonal changes in carbon dioxide levels in the entire atmosphere. Every spring, the trees awaken and start absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. In the fall, the trees shut down and hibernate, and carbon dioxide from an array of sources builds up. Big as the taiga is, however, it's not able to keep up with the carbon dioxide humans have added to the atmosphere since the dawn of the Coal Age and the Industrial Revolution. Carbon dioxide is, after all, the No. 1 greenhouse gas. Giant Trees South of the taiga are other forests, of course. But they are impressive for entirely different reasons. The coast redwoods are the tallest trees in the world towering 300 feet above the ground along the foggy coasts from southern Oregon down to Monterey County, Calif.

These 20-million-year-old forests were extensively logged in the 1800s and early 1900s. Luckily, and unbeknownst to the loggers, these trees can sprout like weeds from their own roots. Today you can tell when you're in a second-growth redwood forest because there are always younger trees growing in a ring around a decayed giant stump. They make an eerie circle of columns, like some sort of strange sylvan temple. Towering as the coast redwoods are, they're matchsticks compared to their Sierra Nevada cousins, the giant sequoias. These are the largest trees on Earth. They can get as tall as coast redwoods, but are far wider, some reaching 29 feet in diameter. The oldest giant sequoia is about 3,200 years old, based on a coring of its annual growth rings. When it comes to age, the giants have to concede to the far smaller, infinitely more twisted and humble bristlecone pines of the eastern Sierra Nevada and other mountains of the Great Basin. By growing very slowly at the highest reaches of the mountains, some of these trees have survived for more than 5,000 years. That's halfway back to the last ice age. Falling Leaves Of course, not all forests are evergreen. There are large broadleaf, deciduous forests all over the world for example, in Russia, the eastern United States and the Rocky Mountains. All these forests have one thing in common: They experience hotter, wetter summers than the taiga. That extra water and summer heat makes broad, water-wasting leaves possible and speeds up decay of older leaves on the ground, which feed the soil and recycle many nutrients to the trees. But dropping leaves is not only about cold. It's also about dryness. Winter in some places can be arid. That's why the leaf-dropping tactic is used by tropical trees in India and even some desert plants. Future Forests What all these forests have in common is that global warming is pushing their habitats poleward, or shrinking what little habitat they have. Since trees can't uproot themselves and walk to the right climate, they have to depend on their seeds dispersing farther toward the poles, germinating along the way to grow new forests. Needless to say, this is not something that happens overnight. A more immediate threat is the demand for lumber, which has pushed loggers into even the virgin taiga of Siberia. The battle for preserving these forests has just begun, and the people trying to save them cleave to the words of the 19th-century American writer Henry David Thoreau: "... the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure."

Excavating the World's Basements

There are monsters in the basements of the world: weird white crabs, pallid blind salamanders, hydrogen-eating bacteria and worms that glow in the dark. They live in caves furnished with bizarre and beautiful crystal chandeliers, limestone turrets and eerily dead-calm lakes. It's a world without day and night and where the only circadian rhythm may be the coming and going of bats or birds, which supply the guano the manna on which most other cave life depends. These outsiders are a conduit for nutrients that ultimately come from a sun the cavebound creatures never see. No one knows how many caves there are on Earth. Probably millions. Many are undiscovered and others are only partially explored. Likewise, there's no telling how many species of specialized cave organisms are out there that have yet to be discovered. Just in the tristate area of Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia, for instance, there are about 15,000 caves, not including hollows less than 50 feet long, says cave conservationist Lynn Roebuck of the National Speleological Society. Swiss Cheese The reason so many places on the planet are riddled with caves is that they all share an abundance of limestone. This rock is rather easily dissolved by even slightly acidic water, which is common enough from water interacting with air and soils. The limestone itself comes from eons of the remains of shells and skeletons of sea creatures piling up on a seafloor. This means, of course, that all limestone was once at the bottom of long lost seas and was later lifted high and dry by tectonic forces. Once on land, rain and snowmelt

filter down from the surface and gradually dissolve the limestone and carry it away. That has left some pretty amazing gaps in the ground. A few caves have more extreme stories of excavation. Sometimes geology conspires to deliver a powerful dose of acid from sulfurous mineral deposits. That's the case at Lechuguilla Cave in southeastern New Mexico, where the mineral mixture carried by groundwater into the cave has produced yellow-tinged formations not of limestone but of delicate gypsum a mineral made of sulfur, calcium and water. Lechuguilla is noteworthy for another reason: It's huge. Since its discovery in 1986, more than 100 miles of continuous caves have been mapped, down to a depth of 1,567 feet. That makes it the fifth longest cave in the world, the third longest in the U.S. and the deepest limestone cave in the country. Another cave with even greater doses of acid is Mexico's Villa Luz Cave. In Villa Luz sulfuric acid forms from rotten-egg-smelling hydrogen sulfide gas that bubbles up in springs. But acidity is no problem to the bacteria that have evolved to live in its depths. In fact, hydrogen sulfide gas provides chemical energy that feed bacteria just like in deep-sea hydrothermal vent communities. A far less corrosive, but completely outsized, relative of Villa Luz is in China's Guangxi and Chongquing provinces. The strange, mushroomy landscape of these parts is due entirely to a vast and monumental layer of regional limestone that is dissolving away. Hidden among the strange hills are remarkable sinkholes called tiankeng, or "sky holes," that are deep and wide enough to hide a few Empire State Buildings. These were all caves once, until their roofs collapsed. Today visitors can actually walk through caves beside an underground river to reach the bottom of one of these sheer-walled holes in the earth. Trouble From Above Living in the basement comes with some problems, of course. Bad stuff flows downhill. Chemicals from leaking sewage tanks, agricultural pollution and industrial waste can find their way into caves, wreaking havoc with the rare life forms there. A major threat to Lechuguilla, for instance, is proposed gas and oil drilling on nearby federal lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Gas or fluids from such mining could potentially leak into the cave's many passages and poison cave life or even cause explosions, according to the National Park Service at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Cave pollution is also hazardous for humans who rely on water from caves. The Maya are said to have gathered drinking water almost entirely from cave sources. In Tennessee, Roebuck remembers the case of a family that for at least three generations had been getting their water from a cave. They called on Roebuck for help in finding the cause of a strange foam found on the cave water. The suspected cause was soap from a leaking septic tank. "We're like Swiss cheese," said Roebuck, describing the underground nature of Tennessee. To make clearer to residents and decision makers how easily water from the surface can contaminate

caves and waters used far and wide, "I usually take a sponge with me ... the water goes right through it," she said. More troubling, however, is vandalism. Volunteers like Roebuck and her husband spend a great deal of their time carefully brushing away spray paint and picking up garbage and other debris deliberately left by humans in caves. They also work with many fellow cavers to clean up sinkholes places where even some city governments once thought it was OK to fill with any sort of waste. Unfortunately, sinkholes are the worst place to dump because they are often the gateways to cave systems. Good News It's not all bad news, however. More and more people are appreciating the importance of protecting caves for their own sake. Part of it might stem from the more general awareness of groundwater issues worldwide, says Roebuck. "There seems to be more awareness about caves," said Roebuck. That includes people learning about the correct ways to explore caves a pastime known as "caving." The National Speleological Society lists good caving practices on their Web site. The bottom line is, "Cave softly."