Underground fungal network spans 110 quadrillion kilometers, study reveals

Beneath every forest floor and grassland, a living architecture of staggering proportion quietly sustains the world above it. A new study has placed a number — 110 quadrillion kilometers — on the fungal filaments threading through Earth's soils, giving scientific weight to what ecologists have long intuited: that the underground is not empty space but a vast, collaborative infrastructure. These mycorrhizal networks bind plants, soils, and ecosystems into something closer to a single organism than a collection of competing individuals, and understanding their true scale may fundamentally reorie