to help restore soil words, natural balance has already been destroyed or artificial microbes. really the answer to morrow to day on dw, we've got some hot tips for your bucket list with no magic corner tread hotspot for food and some great cultural memorials to boot. in w travel off we go in the 1950s farmers in the us work, the land so intensively that the soil eroded years of drought resulted in millions of tons of it being blown away. the effected regions were dubbed the dust bowl.

farming methods have changed over time, but soil degradation is a worldwide problem. how can soil be restored to full health? ah, that's a topic in this edition of d w science magazine. welcome to tomorrow to day. soil not only provides us with feed, it's also a natural habitat, as well as the water and carbon reservoir. it consists of different layers. there's hardly any life in the bedrock and the weathered stone fragments above it. apart from a few isolated roots, water is filtered and stored in the sub soil. the top soil is full of nutrients and forms a habitat for numerous microbes. the human layer it provides the material that plants need to grow. fertile soil doesn't come out of nowhere. it's formed from rocks that are with it by the sun, wind and rain, and it's decomposed by organisms and plants. it takes 2000 years to create 10

centimeters of fertile soil. for soil to remain fatal and healthy microbes need to be present. but that can be a problem what we are doing basically, either destroying the soil day it and now i'm not renewable at resource. christina cru specializes in the interactions between plants, soil and microscopes. what we have been doing so far to living the last dead jawandra is maybe ease to use soils as a substrate to grow plan. we've been under valuing them and expecting them to stay healthy, but tilling over using chemicals and climate change or harming or soils. this is a problem for growing food, as well as resources for clothing in construction. soil is also key to storing

carbon and filtering water to make sales healthy again, we need to start seeing them as what they are, entire ecosystems teeming with hidden life. i'll run by my groups. a healthy soil will have a diversity of microbes. the most common ones are bacteria and fungi. one of their most important jobs is transforming nutrients. every single nutrient cycle on the planet is mostly driven by more. jennifer wood has a background and soil microbial ecology and studies how microbes affect ecosystems . none of these cycles that really exist in a vacuum. they all into linked. one of those new chance i goals is with carbon. plants and animals are made mostly of carbon. and when they die, they're broken down by micros. no microbes, no decomposition. the microbes use some of the carbon to reproduce, storing it in the swell, and breathe the rest of it out, sending it back to the atmosphere. another nutrients, eyeglasses of nitrogen,

which makes them most of the air around us and is one of the main nutrients plants used to grow. plants can't get it from the air by themselves, so they partner with microbes, microbes specifically fund guy, also exchange other nutrients of plants. they very fine routes called hifi. the intertwined themselves with the roots of the plant. a fondness is really good at releasing things like phosphorus was fight from so hot the plastic. so it does that . and exchanges that were in return for things like sugars which a crack in my 3 ferguson. there's also some evidence this relationship makes the plant more able to withstand drought and disease in a degraded soil. these new chain cycles aren't working as well as they could be. climate change is one cause of degrading soils with drought and extreme weather, causing them to dry out in a road intensive. agriculture can be another cause as pesticides and are besides kill off beneficial microbes and reduce their activity. the more degraded soil is

the more chemicals are needed to grow stuff degrading this while even further and when you start digging, it's amazing what you find down there. this is benny france. he's an electra engineer, turned farmer and has been on this land for 4 years. tons of a records are turned in this rate, so i would really running mother into well, mostly. so now, even though different parts of the world have very different soils, one thing all degraded agricultural souls have been comment is that they're susceptible to disease. now we don't want those soils to contain many passages. so the pathogen light might be an indicator of a degrading sla pathogens. the worst soil is degraded, soils also lose their ability to hold in filter water are more susceptible to erosion and have lasses as beneficial microbes, meaning plants don't grow as well. but soil health is about more than just our food

security. boyle community. health is actually the foundation of all the natural and men, the nation of something crumbled. everything else comes tumbling down no till agriculture, leave soil undisturbed, which allows the microbes living inside the clamps to thrive. specifically those fund guy, high feet, which are important for soil structure that can be a kilometer of them and a grams, soil and cover crops planted to leave in the ground, provide micros of carbon to chow down on as well as producer rosen and nutrient los, well and encourages those fungal microbes to grab it can also be made into a liquid fertilizer. first, that once we're going to massage it in and then we're gonna feed it onto the bacteria and that will multiply a lot. this compost, he concentrates microbes into a form that can be sprayed on feel. unfortunately, this kind of farming just isn't possible everywhere you can doing. speaking with me

once, but the problem is the bad, the mountain areas where before we sell this great, then these techniques on multi, now you recover the soil in due time. here's your microbes come in a larger scale. the most common uses is bio fertilizers. they use like chemical base fertilizer if they contain fund guy or bacteria, sol, degredation is a big enough threat that bear a company known personally, i would cultural chemicals is also interested. they are already in the country. thank you. or is the executive vice president for the crop science division with a background of business economy? by the way, certainly be certainly help to review. can be converted to company is also investing in seeds that have been infused with

microsoft because delivering microbes along with seeds is the most targeted way to apply them. seats can also be planted with a coating of microbes, conservation organizations are using this approach to restore ecosystem. a problem with commercial microbial products is that the microbes are not specifically adapted to environment. non native microbes could find it hard to survive, rendering the process useless. and because these are living organisms, they could cause an imbalance in the micro biome. we sees something we need nearly half june to taking concentration, especially. we found john read this brad faster and they are more easy. she sank even better agrees. oh, it doesn't necessarily need a oh, since soils are different around the world,

we would ideally develop microbial products for specific regions. but that will take time and more research. unfortunately, our soil health is an emergency. we are going to need it because we actually covers foils in the sees the cheapest way to do recovery because we are covering them while we are maintaining the ged to for large farms, bio fertilizers are a step above chemicals and where possible. agriculture that relies on helping native my groups like on this farm is the way to go. our soul is becoming more and more depleted from intensive agriculture. where do you see opportunities to better protect the soil ecosystem? that's what we asked on d. w. social media channels vander, gomez writes, infrastructure integration and investment on needed to digitize agriculture. that's crucial for developing countries are as command

takes a very practical approach, we can use organic fertilizer it reminds roberta to to alarcon of the old testament, which describes working the land for 70 and letting it rest for 7 years. maybe if he try us, it will work. he says, thankful will you come in. intensive agriculture not only can see in soil, but also a lot of, whoops, have methods such as drip irrigation can help to reduce consumption. this is important because almost 7 to percent the world's available fresh water ends up on arab alone. yet less than one percent of the s notify is accessible. renewable fresh water above majority is salt water. water is also the subject

of the question sent to us by brown of nobody away from nigerian bowl. is there any liquid water in outer space? more than 2 thirds of the earth's surface is covered with liquid water. that's why it's called the blue planet. liquid water is the most important prerequisite for the creation of life. we believe that life began in hydrothermal, vince at the bottom of the deep ocean, simple organisms which have evolved over billions of years into the animals plants and microbes that populate our planet. to die with our earth is the only planet in the solar system that has liquid water on its surface. liquid water can also be found on the i see moons of the gaseous giants, jupiter and saturn. but it's buried under ice sheets more than

a kilometer. thick water can also be found under the surface of mars. on the red planet surface, though, water is only present as ice or as vapor in the atmosphere. as far as we know, how universe has been around for about 14000000000 years, water has been present for 12000000000 years. astronomers have calculated that from the light of a quasar. water is present everywhere in the universe as vapor or as microscopic crystals clinging to dust grains in the frozen waists about a space on earth, there's liquid water because we orbit the sun at a certain distance. that means the earth surface is at precisely the right temperature, so that water isn't locked up in ice sheets or evaporated into the atmosphere. this all the distance where the earth travels is nicknamed the goldilocks sown. every

star has a similar habitable zone. not only our son, another rocky planet, similar to the earth orbiting. a star in a similar goldilocks own, could also have liquid water on its surface. and so could also support life if our blood is red, why i do you have a science class to send it to us as a video text oh, voicemail. if we answer it on the show, we'll send you a little surprise as the thank you. come on, just does plan. it's beyond the so the system, not what scientist laura cry ferg is looking for so far. she's done this with the help of the hubble telescope, but for several months now. humble success in the james webb telescope has been on

the move in space. it provides fascinating images from the cosmic neighbourhood like the planet jupiter, and is so light sensitive that it can see even very distant galaxies. the near telescope is also expected to be helpful in the search for excel. clue. there are about a 100000000000 stars in the milky way galaxy. we think almost every star has at least one planet. so there are hundreds of billions of planets, lake we in our own galaxy, and hundreds of billions of galaxies out there. ah, i would be shocked if there is no extra terrestrial wife out there. ah

i i think it's so lonely if humans are the only living things the only intelligent beings in the universe. there is such a strong human desire to know who we are and where we come from and why. every time i see a star in the night sky, i asked myself, what kind of planets around it? oh, planets are really places we can imagine them as somewhere you could visit. maybe you wouldn't want to. maybe it's too high. it may be the amateurs made out of toxic gases that would kill us. but nevertheless, it truly is a place that you could imagine going to. and for me,

that's one of the biggest fascinations of when it says that it feel so personal in a way that a star galaxy or black hole doesn't. ah, some planets are so hot that even rocky material rock iron locate glass is vaporized in their atmosphere. and when this rock gas moves into cooler regions, it can condense into clouds and potentially rain out. and so you could think of it as having glass rain on an echo planet. ah, this is so fantastic. we never, this is an example of the type of spectacular discovery that i never could have imagined. there was much, much more variety out there than we ever could have imagined from our own planet.

ah, we do know already that rocky planets extremely common there. tens of billions of those planets in our galaxy alone. we still do not exactly know how come in 1st and last part. just knowing the size of the planet and the temperature of the planet is not the story. one of the biggest goals is to take the next step and measure the atmospheres of these planets directly. and that's the information we need to say. whether it's true we earth like, or not, the nearest planet that we know of is called proximal centauri. be it is the planet perhaps not so different from earth. so similar size, similar temperature is the earth. it is about 4 late years away from us,

which in the whole scheme of the galaxy is right next door. it is so close the even if we tried to get there with normal rocket propulsion, it would kick tens of thousands of years to reach it. oh and the 1st echo planet was discovered in 1995 over 5000 planets have been confirmed around other stars and we've learned a lot about their sizes or temperatures. there were bit and now for my work were just beginning to scratch the surface of what their

atmosphere or like, ah, atmosphere is what makes the planet place. it is responsible for whether it's that's the climate or, and earthlink it determines whether it could possibly be habitable that had to steer also tells us a lot about how the planet formed and how it evolved over time. i 2 of the primary techniques we use to characterize the planets are called transit when the planet passes in front of the star. and also eclipses when the planet passes behind the star. they give us different complimentary information. and so by combining

these types of measurements, we can really get a very complete picture of what the planet is like o. one of the most famous potentially habitable planets has called trappist when this is a very special planetary system, it's nearby, so easy for us to study and the star has 7 rocky planet or bidding it all of them transiting so we can see them. ah, and one of the planets, planet e is in the habitable zone of the stars. so could potentially have liquid water. and it could even have life the so i,

so i think it was the next 10 years will truly be a golden age. upon an atmosphere characterization, there's so much to come and there's this incredible speed, a pace of discovery. it's really incredible. ah, so trappist wind is one of the most popular systems to be observed with the new james web space telescope, which launched on christmas day of 2021 and every single planet in the system will be observed. ah, me, this hospital has a much bigger collecting area than hubble has, and that allows us to push to finter observations.

planet, they're not so hot actually. and so it broadens the number of planets we can look at the. and so it just opens up so many doors to learning about new and different planets. and we've ever study before . the state of u. s. t is only the beginning later on, and the decade will see 1st by it for the next generation of ground based telescope systems. the european extremely large telescope, which is the biggest telescope ever constructed. and that will also provide us with leap forward and what we can learn about the, the planets as to what i expect. the only thing i can say with certainty is that there will be surprises.

ah, every time we look at actual planets we see something we were not expecting to put on my good scientist hat. i have to say, i'm coming in with no expectations. i will let the data guide me. we'll see what we see where it takes a very expert, i to look at our data and interpret what that means for the planet. sometimes i talk to my husband who's a data scientist and he looks at my plots and he says you, you learned what about the planet from those squiggly lines. but i've been working on this now for over a decade. and to me those quigley, lines are beautiful and filled with information. it's like, you know, as if you walked down the street and you and you see someone with bright red hair, black hair, you can so easily tell the difference. and for me,

that's what the specter of the planet's look like. oh, there's such a vast possibility of what these atmospheres and what these plans could be like. i want to know how often rocky planets have atmospheres under what conditions would you expect a planet to be hospitable for life and eventually eventually my big dream is to find evidence for life on a rocky planet. ah, and yet the information we have about them, even with our most advanced newest health folks still never get every piece of information that we would find me. i am grateful for this because it means they have a great and interesting job for many years as we were to figure this out. i do feel

very strongly that we're just at the beginning of a long journey to know for sure that there's another inhabited planet out there completely changes our perspective about our place in the universe. so even if we can't talk to them, even if we can visit them, it's still so important to know. i think it would fascinate people all over the world. the searching for life on other planets makes me appreciate life here on earth, even more. it makes me appreciate all of the things that are special about very a little flower or a brood flying it. it seems even more miraculous to me knowing the vast possibilities that are out there. and here we are on comfortable, cozy earth is our home.

it also makes me very, very conscious of the fact that we need to take care of because it is so special and there is no planet be me and that's all we have time for today. thank you for joining us. see you next time on tomorrow. today, until then, bye bye. ah, [000:00:00;00]

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d. w. ah, ah ah, ah ah, this is dw news live from been in high stakes in the u. s. is millions for pet to vote in mid term elections. president joe biden says a win for the republicans with threatened de no democracy,