Swiss soil underpants study win Ig Nobel Prize

Swiss underpants win an Ig Nobel Prize Keystone-SDA

A Swiss research project to test soil quality with buried underpants has been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for entertaining, yet serious, science.

More than a thousand people from all over Switzerland took part in the ‘Underpants as Evidence’ project. Gardeners and farmers buried two standard cotton pairs of underpants in their soil for the experiment.

The research was conducted by the University of Zurich and the Agroscope research institute.

The decomposition of the cotton fabric served as an indicator of soil activity. The principle is remarkably simple: the faster the underpants disappear, the more life there is in the soil. Bacteria, fungi, earthworms and all sorts of other creatures feast on the cotton. A paradise for soil organisms.

“The aim was to make people aware of how important the soil is,” Marcel van der Heijden from the University of Zurich told the Keystone-SDA news agency.

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In theory, the same results could have been achieved using cotton T-shirts. But public interest would probably have been lower.

Health of Swiss soil

The project has now been awarded the Ig Nobel Prize – an award that honours research which first makes people laugh and then makes them think. “A great honour,” the researchers said.

The underpants also yielded some very important results. They showed that organic soils make conventional fields look rather outdated when it comes to the decomposition of underpants.

Whilst the cotton was heavily nibbled away in organically farmed fields, significantly more fabric remained on some conventional plots. The soils in gardens and meadows proved to be particularly vibrant.

The research data is to be incorporated into a map that will, in future, show how healthy Switzerland’s soils are.

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Translated from German, reviewed by an English Department journalist.