Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

In the Arctic, ancient methane deposits are leaking through ‘windows’ in the earth opened by melting permafrost. Anthrax spores are being released from reindeer corpses buried in once-frozen soil, now exposed by erosion and warmth. In the forests of Eastern Siberia a crater is yawning in the softening ground, swallowing tens of thousands of trees and revealing 200,000-year-old strata: local Yakutian people refer to it as a ‘doorway to the underworld’. Retreating Alpine and Himalayan glaciers are yielding the bodies of those engulfed by their ice decades before. Across Britain, recent heatwaves have caused the imprints of ancient structures – Roman watchtowers, Neolithic enclosures – to shimmer into view as crop-marks visible from above: aridity as X-ray, the land’s submerged past rising up in parched visitation. Where the River Elbe flows through the Czech Republic, summer water levels have recently dropped so far that ‘hunger stones’ have been uncovered – carved boulders used for centuries to commemorate droughts and warn of their consequences. One of the hunger stones bears the inscription ‘Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine’: ‘If you see me, weep.’ In north-west Greenland an American Cold War missile base, sealed under the ice cap fifty years ago and containing hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical contaminants, has begun to move towards the light. ‘The problem,’ writes the archaeologist Þóra Pétursdóttir, ‘is not that things become buried deep in strata – but that ...