For science quickly, I'm Meg Deaf.

As the world heats up, many of the consequences of burning fossil fuels are now painfully obvious.

But there's also this less intuitive consequence.

Under our feet, the economy responsible for the growth of trees and forests is experiencing

inflation.

In case you weren't familiar, atmospheric carbon is a currency that plants use to buy nutrients

from fungi in the soil.

But now there's too much carbon, and that currency is being devalued.

In our last episode, we talked about why this is humans fault.

Now, we want to take you down into the tree roots, where this trading happens.

And then, all the way up to outer space, where scientists are figuring out how to map forests

from satellites.

First, to find out where this economy will go next, the devil is in the details, and

the details are in the dirt.

Maybe like the wetter spots.

Yeah, like here, like if you look at this leaf here, you see that it's kind of like

innovative with these threads, like this, all that.

Oh, wow.

That's all fungi.

That, wait, that's like, it's hairy.

Yeah, yeah, it's very visible.

I like also, I don't get it, like where are they, but that's fungi, all the way up.

...