QUANTA MAGAZINE with support from the Pulitzer Center

A vast meshwork of soil-bound fungi governs life aboveground. In Alaska, and at field sites around the world, researchers are racing to understand exactly how, with critical stores of carbon at stake.

One Tuesday in June 2025, a white Chevy Suburban set off down the northernmost highway in North America. The sun of Alaska’s polar summer hadn’t set in 40 days, and it wouldn’t set again for another 35. But for Michael Van Nuland, the biologist in the driver’s seat, time was already running out.

The SUV, packed with four days of fieldwork essentials — rubber boots for mucking in marshes, GPS for centimeter-level precision, a steel tube for extracting soil cores from permafrost — growled along the Dalton Highway, which sews an asphalt-and-gravel seam through the tundra of Alaska’s northern coast. Through the window, the lack of visible trees suggested a barren landscape, but looks are deceiving. The miles of sedge and duvet-thick moss formed the basis of a feast for seasonal caribou, grizzlies, muskox, and roughly 200 bird species.

Van Nuland was more interested in what was happening underground, where sprawling systems of fungal threads — from microscopic ducts to arteries thick as yarn — extended dozens of feet horizontally in all directions. By connecting plant roots and circulating nutrients, this dense, networked scaffold sustained life above the surface.

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