Underland

Robert Macfarlane structures Underland as a series of journeys into the spaces beneath the Earth's surface, what he calls the underland. Linked by interludes called "Chambers," the book's chapters move across Britain, Europe, and the Arctic North, exploring three tasks humans have performed underground across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful. Running through these explorations is the concept of deep time, the vast expanses of Earth history measured in epochs and aeons, which Macfarlane argues should provoke ethical responsibility toward future generations rather than nihilistic comfort.

Before setting out, Macfarlane receives two objects: a double-cast bronze casket containing sealed ashes of its maker's personal demons, which he must dispose of in the deepest underland site he reaches, and a whalebone owl talisman carved from the rib of a minke whale, which he must carry at all times to help him see in the dark.

In the Mendip Hills of Somerset, poet and caver Sean Borodale guides Macfarlane through a landscape used for burial for over 10,000 years, from the Mesolithic human remains discovered in Aveline's Hole to some 400 Bronze Age barrows. Together they descend into cave systems, navigating a boulder ruckle (an unstable pile of collapsed boulders) and a bedding plane, a narrow passage along a rock layer, so tight it crushes speech. Macfarlane recounts the 1959 death of Neil Moss, a twenty-year-old Oxford student who suffocated after becoming wedged in a narrow shaft and was entombed in concrete at his father's request.

At the Boulby potash mine in Yorkshire, Macfarlane descends half a mile underground to visit a dark-matter laboratory housed in 250-million-year-old rock salt. Dark matter, invisible yet thought to constitute about 27 percent of the universe's mass, is the target of the DRIFT experiment, which uses ultra-thin charged wires to detect rare collisions between WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) and ordinary matter. Mine-safety specialist Neil Rowley drives Macfarlane through tunnels extending beneath the North Sea, where spent mining machines are abandoned to be slowly entombed by flowing salt. Macfarlane introduces the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch defined by planetary-scale human impact, and reflects on trace fossils as the marks the vanished leave behind.

In Epping Forest, plant scientist Merlin Sheldrake guides Macfarlane through the "wood wide web," the underground fungal network connecting trees. Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard's groundbreaking 1997 research showed that mycorrhizal fungi, root-associated organisms linking trees underground, allow forests to share nutrients and support struggling neighbors. Merlin describes fungi as organisms that thwart conventional categories. Macfarlane weaves in ethnobotanist Robin Wall Kimmerer's advocacy for a "grammar of animacy" that recognizes life in the more-than-human world, and introduces the term "species loneliness" for the solitude humans create by stripping Earth of other life.

In Paris, Macfarlane enters the catacombs, over 200 miles of quarry-void galleries beneath the city, with companions Lina and Jay. They wade through flooded passages, sleep in the Oyster Room amid carved stone and quarrymen's inscriptions from the late 1700s, and reach the Salle du Drapeau, where cataphiles, devotees of the catacombs' underground subculture, have laid out food and drink in celebration. The most terrifying section requires crawling beneath the Métro, where decades of train vibration have left the ceiling cracked and sagging. Beginning in 1786, the remains of more than 6 million corpses were transferred from overflowing cemeteries to these tunnels in nightly funerary processions. Macfarlane threads the narrative with Walter Benjamin's vision of Paris's subterranean city from The Arcades Project.

On the Carso plateau above Trieste, Macfarlane stays with his friend Lucian Comoy, a translator, and explores the Reka-Timavo, a river running underground for some 22 miles through the karst, a soluble limestone landscape of caves and disappearing rivers. With elderly guide Sergio, who has descended the Abyss of Trebiciano approximately 400 times over 50 years, Macfarlane drops 1,000 vertical feet to a cathedral-sized chamber where the starless river thunders past dunes of black sand. He recounts the deaths of explorers drawn to flooded underlands, including caver Marcel Loubens, who died in the Pierre Saint-Martin chasm in 1952, and free-diver Natalia Molchanova, who vanished off the coast of Ibiza.

In the Slovenian highlands, Macfarlane and Lucian encounter a glacier preserved inside a mountain cave and stumble upon a foiba, a sinkhole used as a mass-killing site during and after the Second World War, where partisan and militia forces pushed victims into limestone chasms. Macfarlane reflects on "occulting" landscapes where past violence and present beauty coexist in unresolved tension.

On the Lofoten archipelago in winter, Macfarlane crosses the Lofoten Wall, the mountain barrier dividing the archipelago's sheltered east from its exposed west coast, in blizzard conditions. He ascends through windslab, dense wind-packed snow prone to avalanche, falls partially through a snow crevasse, and cuts through a cornice, an overhanging ridge of wind-built snow, to reach the wild western shore. He enters Kollhellaren, a sea cave containing painted figures roughly 2,000 to 3,000 years old, made with red iron oxide pigment. At first he sees nothing; then, as his eyes adjust, spectral red dancers shimmer into view, and he weeps unexpectedly.

On the island of Andøya, fisherman Bjørnar Nicolaisen describes his fight against Norway's oil industry over plans to drill off the Lofoten and Vesterålen islands. Bjørnar built a coalition of environmentalists, fishermen, and young people, experiencing three mental health crises during the campaign. After seismic blasting, fish and whales disappeared for years. Macfarlane introduces Glenn Albrecht's concept of solastalgia, a form of distress caused by the environmental transformation of a familiar place into something unrecognizable.

In East Greenland during the record-breaking melt of 2016, Macfarlane's team crosses crevasse fields and camps on rock recently exposed by retreating ice. Greenlander hunter Geo, who serves as an adopted father to one of the group's guides, predicts starkly that within a decade there will be no snow, no ice, no hunting, and no dogs. Ice-core scientist Robert Mulvaney explains how air bubbles trapped in glacial ice preserve atmospheric records spanning hundreds of thousands of years. At the Knud Rasmussen glacier, the group witnesses a catastrophic calving: a city of ice collapsing into the fjord, followed by the surge of ancient black ice from the depths. Macfarlane descends into a moulin, a vertical meltwater shaft bored through the glacier, pendulums through a waterfall, and perches on a blade of ice 60 feet down, gazing into a passage glowing with blue light.

In Finland, Macfarlane visits Onkalo, a nuclear waste repository under construction 1,500 feet deep in 1.9-billion-year-old gneiss, a metamorphic rock, on Olkiluoto Island. Designed to store 6,500 tons of spent uranium for 100,000 years, the facility nests fuel within layers of zirconium, iron, copper, bentonite clay, and bedrock. He connects the site to the Finnish folk epic Kalevala, which warns against bringing buried materials of great energy to the surface, and to the field of nuclear semiotics, which grapples with how to communicate danger to unknown future beings across millennia. In the deepest chamber, he finds a handprint in dust on a plastic panel, linking it to the prehistoric hand-prints at Chauvet, the red dancers of Kollhellaren, and the spray-can stencils in the Paris catacombs.

In the closing chapter, months later, Macfarlane takes his four-year-old son to Nine Wells Wood near their home. They count nine springs rising from the chalk, and the boy drinks cold water from his father's cupped hand. As they leave, the child runs into bright sunshine, and Macfarlane is struck by the sudden knowledge that his son will die. Color drains from the world and floods back. He catches up, and the boy raises a hand in the air, fingers spread wide. Macfarlane reaches out and meets it palm to palm, completing the gesture of open-handed encounter across time that recurs throughout the book.