A bog is as subtle as landscape gets. At first glance, it might present as a monochrome horizon, a brown soup of unrelieved dullness. Look closely. The careful eye can tease out paisleys of color and form. There are blue and green lichens in shapes like antler horns or tiny trumpets. Bogs are home to purple moor grass, vermilion cranberries, beetles, badgers, skylarks, and red deer, which bathe in peat to shed flies. In addition to a startling array of life, bogs harbor mystery and death. Hundreds of bog bodies have turned up in northern Europe. In 1952, a peat digger in Denmark found a man who died at age 34—throat slit from ear to ear—in a bog. Conditions in the sodden sphagnum moss had preserved the body, hair and nails intact, for 2,300 years. Experts now suspect that Grauballe Man, as he is known, was a victim of ritual sacrifice, not murder as once thought. About 990 million acres (400 million hectares) of peatlands remain on five continents. They are disappearing fast. Large-scale cutting of peat for fuel, harvesting of sphagnum for horticulture, and draining of wetlands threaten most of Europe's remaining bogs. The potential loss extends beyond the evidence of past civilizations and distinctive plants. Not only do bogs help control water levels in surrounding areas, they also collect and store carbon from the atmosphere. The world's peatlands may contain more carbon than is currently in Earth's entire atmosphere. As bogs disappear, carbon is released. Destruction of Siberian bogs alone could unleash billions of tons of greenhouse gases. There is little mystery about the consequences of that.