The Earth in a teaspoon

My home, well, one of my homes, is on the Isle of Wight. If we could choose our own famous cliché we might be known, perhaps, for many things – red squirrels, dormice, and Glanville fritillaries, Charles Darwin and Robert Hooke, or Julia Margaret Cameron, Karl Marx, and Jimi Hendrix.

But the famous factoid that everybody ‘knows’ about us is that all the world’s people could stand on the Isle of Wight.

Well eat your urban myth heart out, Isle of Wight. You’ve been beaten by a teaspoonful of soil.

There are as many organisms in a teaspoonful of soil as there are people on the Earth.
I heard it at the Natural History Museum so it must be true.

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