Google Earth is the last of the 12 maps that Jerry Brotton covers in his monumental A History of the World in 12 Maps, and his initial description is reverential: “This is the geographer’s ultimate object of study, an image of the whole earth.”

Macfarlane’s conception of the underland is complex - un-bound by the typical images of caves and tunnels. The underland is a place of “deep time”, a place of “epochs and aeons.” It is a place where humanity represents just a blip in the grand history of the earth, and where its memories are kept hidden. It is a place where strange, old things are buried - and from which these things are emerging, with the advent of the Anthropocene. It is precisely because we are being confronted with the underland that Macfarlane has chosen to write about it.