Hey, it's Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. And boy, we hit all the topics here at TED for good reason. Topics like dirt. The dirt under our feet might not be something you think much about. But in her talk from the Countdown Summit in 2021, climate change scientist Jane Zelikova

paints a picture of the vast ecosystem in the soil and the tremendous potential soil microbes

offer in fighting climate change. Under our feet, there is an unseen world more diverse than all the tropical rainforests combined.

Teaming with microbial life and critters large and small, this hidden world of soil is on every

single continent. But most of us know little to nothing about this vast world under our feet.

And for most of my life, I was no exception.

I grew up very curious and adventurous kid.

I spent a lot of time climbing trees and falling out of them,

and I spent a lot of time getting really dirty.

In college, I had to take a class for a science requirement,

and I was shocked to discover that being really curious and loving dirt could be a legitimate career.

So I took no convincing whatsoever for me to change my major, and that's how I became

an ecologist. In graduate school, I studied how the loss of a seed disperser, in this case,

the winnow ant, affected the plants that they disperse. In my research site, we were discovering

that these ants were moving up in elevation

to escape a rapidly changing climate, but they were leaving the plants they dispersed behind.

So while I came to grad school to study ants, I all of a sudden found myself studying climate change.

And because ants nest andests, and soils,

I had to learn a lot more about soil.

What I couldn't have predicted as that young, curious, budding ecologist

was that I would spend the next decade of my life

thinking about the invisible army of soil microbes

...