Hero gophers. After Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, the landscape looked bleak. So scientists tried something weird: they dropped a few gophers onto the barren pumice and let them dig. They wanted the critters to stir up buried microbes, so that life might someday return—and it worked. Within years, plants exploded back. And now, more than four decades later, researchers say that one-day experiment is still paying off, thanks to underground fungal networks the gophers helped revive.
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