‘Proof by Underpants’ Offers a Cheeky Way to Test Soil
You don’t necessarily need advanced sensor technology or fancy tools to assess the health of the soil just beneath your feet. As ecologists and around 1,000 citizen scientists in Switzerland recently demonstrated, sometimes all that’s required is a pair of undies and a shovel.
In 2021, a team at the University of Zurich (UZH) partnered with the country’s federal agricultural research center, Agroscope, to launch Beweisstück Unterhose, aka Proof By Underpants. The mission was simple—gather as many volunteers as possible and direct them to bury a combination of cotton underwear and clean tea bags at roughly 1,000 strategically selected locations around Switzerland. Participants then retrieved the items two months later, photographed their decomposition progress, and mailed them to a lab along with a soil sample.
This wasn’t some type of meta-performance art project. Instead, researchers hoped to highlight the ecological importance of soil health, while also gaining a better sense of current ground conditions around the country.