What’s Happening Underground? More Than We Imagine.

September 16, 2026

By Derek DiMatteo

Journeys into the underworld (κατάβασις in ancient Greek) fascinate us both in myth and reality. We can read about such journeys in nearly every cultural and religious tradition, from ancient Mesopotamian myths to modern Christianity to the high fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien to contemporary rescue stories about people trapped underground. Attentive to these many stories, Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019) takes readers below the surface of the Earth in nearly every continent, sharing with us experiences we could hardly expect to have ourselves—and in doing so, Macfarlane helps us see what would otherwise be unseen, such as mine shafts that stretch for miles just below the ocean bed of the English channel, the catacombs and quarry voids deep beneath Paris, and the cavernous depths of a glacier in Greenland.

Underland is organized in three sections—Part 1 Seeing (Britain), Part 2 Hiding (Europe), and Part 3 Haunting (The North)—with each section introduced by an interstitial piece (titled First Chamber, Second Chamber, and Third Chamber) that muses on the themes, myths, and locations that will be explored in that part’s chapters. These chapters are wide-ranging and blend Macfarlane’s journalistic flair for storytelling with a reporter’s acumen for integrating research that is written accessibly for general readers. I loved his chapter on “The Understorey,” set in Epping Forest, London, for it revolves around his visit with Merlin Sheldrake of Entangled Life fame), providing some highlights of Sheldrake’s excellent book about mycelial networks while taking us into new realms, and allowing us to walk alongside the two of them. Other chapters that stand out include “Dark Matter,” “Invisible Cities,” and “Meltwater.”

Chapter 3, “Dark Matter,” showcases Macfarlane’s ability to mix storytelling with historical and scientific reporting as he brings readers on two tours, both located at the village of Boulby on the Yorkshire coast. The first tour is 3600 feet below ground in the Boulby Underground Laboratory where researchers study dark matter, which makes up 27% of the universe’s mass and “the particles of which almost wholly refuse to interact with Baryonic matter,” which is the 5% of the universe’s mass that we are familiar with (p. 57). This lab is housed inside a mine—the location of the chapter’s second tour. The ICL Boulby Mine consists of a network of over 600 miles of tunnels and roadways used to extract potash and rock-salt, and which starts below Boulby and runs extensively beneath the seabed of the North Sea. Inside this network, Macfarlane rides around in a jeep, noticing the similarity between this human-made tunnel system and the “cross-sections…of the interiors of termite mounds and ants’ nests, rabbit warrens and mole runs,” the same as any other “animal’s burrow-complex, bored out in search of resources” (p. 73). Another such complex is found below Paris.

Paris’s underground caverns, abandoned quarries, and buried ancient architecture is explored in Chapter 5, “Invisible Cities.” Macfarlane situates us by referencing Walter Benjamin’s book The Arcades Project, a 13-year-long effort by Benjamin to map “the topography, history and humanity of Paris” in a compendium that ran over 1000 pages and remained uncompleted. But Macfarlane not only tells us the history of these catacombs, he describes his own journey into them (guided by local urban explorers), enabling readers to get a sense of what it is like to clandestinely descend into the tunnels below Paris, traverse flooded passageways, squeeze through small holes that empty out into chambers full of human bones from the 17th and 18th centuries, and otherwise travel across the city in what seems like an adventure right out of a Neil Gaiman novel.

Far from Paris in southeastern Greenland is the Knud Rasmussen Glacier (aka Apuseeq), the setting of Chapter 11, “Meltwater.” Incredibly scenic aboveground, albeit scary when calving, the area is even more alluring below the surface. One of the characteristics of glaciers that I hadn’t known before is that they are loud: “The noise comes without warning out of the fog-bank and shakes our bodies like bags of jelly” (p. 370) and “is like moving in next door to a thunderstorm” (p. 374). This surprised me because I had always imagined a glacier to be silent, the way a New England college campus is silent during winter break when blanketed by 12 inches of freshly falling snow. Some of this noise is caused by calving events, when parts of the ice sheet break off into the sea. Macfarlane describes the scale of calving as resembling “a Gothic city being pushed into the sea. Towers, belfries, chimneys, cathedrals, finials: all are going over the edge” (p. 373). Again, the comparison making it easier to visualize the enormity of scale.

Burial and surfacing are two subjects that recur throughout the book. Burial refers not only to interring human remains in places where descendants can return to honor them, but it also refers to hiding away in secure locations materials that can cause harm, such as nuclear waste. And surfacing is something that Macfarlane describes with remarkably vivid imagery whenever he recounts the moment that he steps back to the surface from one of his underground journeys. His descriptions of those moments of surfacing read almost like a disorientation and rush of light and color assailing the senses, and I wondered whether it was at all comparable to divers surfacing and coming close to getting the bends. Near the end of the book, Macfarlane returns to a question he had asked near the beginning: “Are you being a good ancestor?”—it is a question that asks us to imagine ourselves as our own great-great-grandchildren looking back at this era and judging what we’ve done. (How) will we be remembered?

References and Resources

Arctic Exposure. “East Greenland Photo Workshop with Arctic Exposure.” YouTube. October 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrav988B13Y.

Blakely, Rhys. “Delving into dark matter inside Britain’s deepest science laboratory.” The Times. July 22, 2026. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/boulby-deepest-laboratory-scientists-mars-technology-j6qpx7fnc.

Boulby Underground Laboratory. Science and Technology Facilities Council. https://www.boulby.stfc.ac.uk/.

Dancing Philosophy. “Walter Benjamin's Paris: Projecting the Arcades.” YouTube. January 16, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPl1HbRaCKU.

Dara Tah. “3 Days in the Paris Catacombs.” YouTube. August 31, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdGSl7rB0vo.

Exposure Labs. “‘CHASING ICE’ captures largest glacier calving ever filmed - OFFICIAL VIDEO.” YouTube. December 14, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC3VTgIPoGU.

Geographics. “The Catacombs of Paris: The Empire of Death Beneath the City of Lights.” YouTube. September 12, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQJmn6z3h5Q.

IFLScience. “How the Boulby Lab Is Hunting Dark Matter Over One Kilometer Underground.” YouTube. March 4, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pfP5Y4mszU.

Johnson, Lee and Adam Proctor. “Dark Matter: The Underground Lab Unlocking the Universe.” BBC. February 23, 2023. https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0f4w17x/watch.

kubler. “Secrets of the Forbidden Catacombs (Urbex Paris).” YouTube. May 25, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OjRCKhp7kc.

Macfarlane, Robert. Underland: A Deep Time Journey. W. W. Norton. 2019.

Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape our Futures. Random House, 2020.

Visit Greenland. “Greenland’s Glaciers Under a Changing Climate.” https://visitgreenland.com/articles/greenlands-glaciers-under-a-changing-climate/.

Wikipedia. “Arcades Project.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project.

Wikipedia. “Boulby Mine.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulby_Mine.

Wikipedia. “Katabasis.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katabasis.

Wikipedia. “Walter Benjamin.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin.