In 1978 the British government funded a study which drew soil samples from sites at intersection points of a three-by-three-mile grid covering England and Wales – 5,662 samples in all. Soil stores twice as much carbon as vegetation or the atmosphere, but a research paper published in Nature estimates that the British soil is losing 13 million tons of carbon a year. Michael McDonough reports, "Their study suggested that while the increase global growth in vegetation is absorbing some of the carbon dioxide released by human activity, this is being offset by the loss of carbon from the soil." This loss of carbon is likely a result of rising temperatures resulting from climate change, McDonough reports, pointing out that microbes in soil are more active at warmer temperatures.