This article is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. T. Neil Davis is a seismologist with the Institute. Perhaps the earthworms' cousins, the almost-legendary iceworms, are more numerous in the North.
Earthworms live in strange places.
They survive in sewage beds, manure piles, beneath the bark of trees, and in tropical ferns growing high above the ground. Able to live submerged in water, earthworms have been found in mud beneath deep lakes, and also in moss on rocks above the beeline in the Himalayas and the Andes. This requirement, more than anything else, seems to prevent earthworms from living in northern soils, where the forest soil typically is too acidic. Many years ago, a student dug up earthworms from soil adjacent to a dormatory on the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. During the summer of 1980, U.S. Geological Survey geologist Florence Weber found an earthworm in organic soil 20 inches below the surface in the valley of the upper Salcha River, near Fairbanks.