The Ground Beneath the Plow: How Earthquake Science Exposed a Hidden Crisis in American Farmland

The Ground Beneath the Plow: How Earthquake Science Exposed a Hidden Crisis in American Farmland

For decades, soil scientists have warned that intensive tillage degrades farmland. The evidence was mostly chemical and biological — nutrient depletion, microbial die-off, erosion. What nobody had measured, until now, was the physical structural damage happening beneath the surface at a scale previously invisible to agricultural research. It took earthquake scientists to find it. A team of geophysicists at the University of Washington turned sei…