I need to move on and find my field plots, but pausing here has caused my feet to sink. They are now completely buried by peat; only my shins remain visible. I shift my weight from side to side and point my toes to break the suction, releasing a loud squelching retort and sending tiny bubbles to the surface.
Walking through boglands requires a marriage of physical and mental strength. My footsteps push deep into soft ground, causing pools of dark cold water to rise over my boots. With no physical boundaries to mark distance, time stretches to match the cadence of bog walking. I pick a careful path, each step punctuated by the slop of rubber boots against sopping moss. The only distraction is the relentless droning of the mosquitoes and black flies encircling my head — a cacophony so loud that I will continue to hear it in my dreams, long after I have returned to firm ground.
The threat of breaking through is real. Ankles, knees, sometimes even thighs can be swallowed by the peat, innocent at the surface but becoming sinister with depth. I have learned that the only way to reclaim yourself from the peat is to give in. I have seen those who wage a physical battle against it, their arms pushing down to extract themselves, creating sinkholes of water, which open sideways and fill their clothes with more weight. It is exhausting, and while you struggle, the peat waits patiently, inviting you deeper.
Once, walking along a cutline not too far from where I stand now, my field partner became deeply stuck in the peat. She struggled, pushing her arms down until she was nearly waist-deep. Before I could intervene, she impatiently lurched upward and slipped out of her hip-high boots, leaving one buried. As she laughed at her misfortune, I groaned and watched the peat close in around her offering. We tried for hours to extract it, but she ended up walking miles back to our car bootless.
Instead, it is better to make peace with the marshland, to give it respect. Suppress the urge to struggle and instead feel the rhythm of the suction as bubbles are pushed up and around your body. Swaying and dancing with peat creates physical space around your limbs that breaks the suction, allowing you, ever so carefully, to rise to the surface and venture on your way, feeling more than a little bit lucky.
By the time I get to my field plots, my boots are wet but intact. Rusting metal pins with orange flags frayed by years of weather mark corners of study areas I have monitored for decades.
When bogs first form on the landscape, the peat layer — the fundamental base — is thin. With only a shallow veneer of peat separating them from the water table, aquatic moss and other plants flourish. As time passes, peat thickens, lifting the bog surface above the reach of groundwater, known as the regional water table. In this slow rise as bogs mature, their character begins to change. Plants must reach deeper for water, promoting those suited to drier conditions. Low, woody shrubs take hold, from delicate bog rosemary to robust Labrador tea, casting dappled shade on the peat surface as the bog grows more complex.
Peat accumulation, surface elevation, and plant species shift together slowly, over millennia. Yet, though I have been monitoring these marked plots for only 20 years, I have witnessed remarkable changes. It is warmer and drier now compared to when I first staked out the plots. The vegetation is different. There is more crusty lichen mixed into the ground vegetation, and the surface peat is dryer and denser. Sphagnum moss is still present, but it looks unhealthy, dry, and bleached out. These are all signs of drought, which has accelerated change at the bog surface, perhaps causing peat accumulation to stop entirely. The next time I visit, a few years from now, the moss may be entirely dead.
Such rapid changes, whether as a response to a warming climate or to drainage and agricultural development, are affecting peatlands around the world. Throughout modern history, humans have destroyed bogs, and they continue to do so today. But this bog in the heart of remote northern Saskatchewan tells us that even pristine peatlands far from any farm or city are under threat of rapid change.
As I finish making observations from the field plots and close my notebook, I crush a few unlucky mosquitoes between its pages. My notes on the plants and surface peat at this location extend back 20 years, carefully recorded each time I visit this remote place.
But as I stand up, I am aware that beneath my feet is 8,000 years of information laid down in strata. Digging into deep peat is like traveling back in time. Back at the beginning, when the bog first formed, open prairies and tundra dominated Canada, trees were just beginning to demarcate the ultimate sites of today’s great boreal forest, and people around the world were shifting from hunting and gathering to a more agricultural way of living. If we were to dig all the way to the bottom of this bog, we would find the physical existence of that lost landscape, in the remains of the plants and insects that lived and thrived in this very place so long ago.
Those remains have now become part of the bog itself, forming peat layers in quiet increments that loft the bog surface up toward the sky ever so slightly, year after year. As peat becomes thicker over many centuries, the accumulation of plant, microbial, and insect fragments — life on the bog surface that resisted the ultimate fate of decomposition and a true return to earth — become a time capsule of change as the bog silently records its impressions for posterity.
I reach my hand into the moss, penetrating into peat, pushing straight down until my elbow is buried. Roots poke gently against my fingers, and the entire medium feels wetter and slimier with depth. I grab a handful and pull my arm out of the ground, through the drier epidermis of moss. My skin is now stained almost black, and tiny beads of water cling to my fingers.
I cradle the peat in my cupped hand, appreciating all that it represents. This material used to be alive, and I can still make out fragments of moss and sedge parts that grew at the surface when it formed. Those plants drew carbon out of the atmosphere via photosynthesis, and when they died, their biomass and all the carbon contained in it became pages in the bog’s own chronicle.
This peat is at the heart of what makes a bog a bog. These are places where a peat layer at least 40 centimeters (about 16 inches) thick has steadily built up. Peat forms when dead plant remnants accumulate faster than microbes can decompose them. This over-abundance of death, and the resultant accumulation of dense, organic layers, is a signature trait of boglands.
Other wetlands, like swamps and marshes, remain more balanced on the teeter-totter of life and death: In those places, peat never quite has the chance to form its own crypt.
The peat in my hand is not unique to boglands alone. Thin layers of it blanket the surface of many ecosystems, from forests and shrublands to wetlands, and it appears in every terrestrial biome on Earth, from the far north to the tropics. Peat is ubiquitous. In one place, peat might form because microbes are constrained by cold or wet soils; in another, it builds slowly where plant tissues, like dense wood, resist decay.
In boglands, many of these peat-forming forces converge, giving rise to thick, spongy layers over time. This usually requires persistent waterlogging, which starves microbes of the oxygen that is essential for the swift breakdown of organic matter. Deprived of oxygen, microbes turn to slower, less efficient chemical reactions. Microbial life persists, but it does so sluggishly, and as a result peat thickens century by century, creating a history beneath our feet accumulated layer by layer.
Once peat forms, it exerts powerful effects on ecosystems. As the remains of plant life whose breakdown has been halted or is incomplete, peat hoards nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus — elements the plant spent energy drawing from the soil. Instead of being returned and recycled to the living world to nourish new growth through normal decomposition processes, these nutrients are locked away in peat’s organic vault, sealed off from microbes.
This slow sequestration reinforces the very conditions that entice peat to form: nutrient scarcity and sluggish decay. In this self-perpetuating loop, peat gives rise to more peat.
Peat’s effects are not merely physical. Seemingly endless layers of it give bogs a primitive, ancient aspect that forces us to think about the natural world through a time traveler’s lens. Literary scholar Maureen O’Connor and archaeologist Benjamin Gearey describe bogs as “recalcitrant landscapes that hold traces of past people and societies.” Bogs are portals into worlds that may seem alien to us at times, but they are simply a window to gaze into our own past, if we are brave enough to look, listen, and learn from them.
This article The ancient environmental archive hidden beneath a northern bog is featured on Big Think.