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+45.7K per minute · since 00:00 UTC
This is a live, continuously changing estimate. It isn't printed here because a figure on paper would be wrong the moment you read it — see the current value at https://earthnow.app/signal/soil-lost-to-erosion-today.
Estimated, not measured
By FAO's reckoning a single centimetre of soil takes more than a thousand years to form, and it can be lost far faster. It is the slowest-renewing resource in agriculture and the one least often counted.
Estimated tonnes of topsoil lost to wind and water erosion since midnight UTC.
Nobody counts this as it happens. EarthNow takes a published figure for the whole day, divides it by the 86,400 seconds in a day, and multiplies by the seconds elapsed since midnight UTC. So the value climbs smoothly and is the right order of magnitude — but the smoothness is arithmetic, not observation. Nothing happening in the world is being watched in real time.
value = daily total ÷ 86,400 × seconds since 00:00 UTC
A consequence worth knowing: the counter resets at midnight UTC, not at your midnight. And because the figure advances at a constant rate, this page cannot tell you whether today is unusual. For that you need a measurement.
~24 billion tonnes of fertile soil lost to erosion per year.
The figure is theirs; the running total is ours. Cite them for the number, and EarthNow for what it looks like as it accumulates.
Citation