Meet the Tiny Desert Slime that Holds our Topsoil Together. For Now.

By Lyndal Cairns

If your eyes were microscopes and you had really good sunblock, you could lie down in the Arizona Desert and watch tiny microbes build colonies of millions around you. These greeblies, called cyanobacteria, colonize the very top layer of soil and need little more than sunshine to survive. In their wake, they leave a trail…