Soils store more carbon than all the vegetation on the Earth's surface. However, there are still many unanswered questions about precisely which processes favor accumulation in the soil. Under the leadership of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), a team of soil scientists has developed a new method to show where and under what conditions carbon is stored in the soil. As they write in Nature Communications, it is primarily the network of soil pores that controls the spatial distribution of carbon.