What the research team found was that while soil organic matter might look and behave as a fairly homogenous substance at typical human scales, even from soil to soil, organic matter takes on entirely different properties at the nano-scale.
"There is this incredible nanoscale heterogeneity of organic matter in terms of soil," said Johannes Lehmann, a Cornell associate professor of crop and soil sciences and lead author of the study. "None of these compounds that you can see on a nanoscale level looks anything close to the sum of the entire organic matter."
For me, these observations have implications for microbial ecology. The materials observed by the science team serve as food and energy sources, as well as physical substrates for attachment for a variety of bacteria. So if the distribution of food and niche space is this diverse at the nano-scale, imagine the incredible diversity of life forms and their bizarre survival strategies to be found in a single gram of soil! There can be completely different processes taking place, mediated by completely different species of organisms across distance scales smaller than the breadth of a baby’s hair. Before you get too excited, let me emphasize that such ideas about soil have been around for some time - they are not original by me, nor new. But, even if they seem to be completely rational and logical in the absence of such hard evidence, such fine scale observations provide critical support for these ideas. All of these things working together, the living and non-living components functioning in rich combinations at extremely small scales, give us soil. And soil, in turn, has given us food, building substrates, polymers, antibiotics, and more. Truly, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
