Boglands : The Hidden World of Earth's Most Extraordinary Ecosystems

A world-leading ecologist's grand tour of the strangest and least understood of all Earth's landscapes Bogs form from an overabundance of death, organic matter breaking down to form layer upon layer of peat. That peat gives rise to lifeforms that challenge our understanding of biology itself: amphibian-eating plants and acid-flinging mosses, plant clones that span thousands of square miles and subterranean 'zombie' fires which smoulder under peat for years at a time. These fecund, sumptuous places have an ecology like nowhere else. Ranging from Greece, home to the world's oldest bog, to Antarctica's protobogs, Merritt Turetsky guides us through these dark, vertical landscapes which archive millennia of Earth's history and shelter some of Earth's rarest and most precious organisms. Beautifully written popular science meets natural history in the vein of Thomas Halliday's Otherlands and Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life