#technofossils

Excerpt from this story from National Geographic:

For less than two dollars, you can purchase a 10-pack of the bestselling pen in the world. Since being introduced in the 1950s, almost 150 billion Bic Cristals have been made. The pen is an exceedingly ordinary item found in most schools and workplaces across the globe. But it harbors a tiny secret. Inside the tip sits a one-millimeter-diameter perfect sphere made of tungsten carbide. It’s this minuscule ball that gives the pen its name and allows it to draw smoothly across a sheet of paper.  

The compound tungsten carbide doesn’t exist in nature; it was engineered to be nearly as tough as diamonds and is likely as long-lasting. Highly resistant to wear, heat, impact, and corrosion, tungsten carbide isn’t found just in pens. Trekking poles, guitar slides, armor-piercing shells, and fishing weights all use it too. Millions of years from now, fragments of these items will remain deep in the earth. They will never degrade, serving as a geological time stamp to mark humanity’s presence on the planet.  

A ballpoint pen is a technofossil, just like a cellphone, its charger, leather shoes, and plastic-laced tea bags. Paleontologist Sarah Gabbott explains that a technofossil is “anything that is man-made, including all the new materials that we’ve made.” Gabbott and geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, colleagues at the University of Leicester, examine technofossils and their impact on Earth in their recent book, Discarded: HowTechnofossilsWillBeOur Ultimate Legacy. Technofossils can be as small as a single radioactive particle, carried on the wind from a testing site, or they can be as large as an entire city, slumping into the sea after decades of climate change.  What defines technofossils is their human element. They are unique to our species and terrifically specific to our current time.  

In our unprecedented era of human-made stuff, Gabbott and Zalasiewicz ask a provocative question: Where will it all go? “At the heart of this book is a description of the world we’re making, how long it will last, and how long it will be dangerous,” Zalasiewicz says.  

As an eternal testament of humanity, plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones are not a glorious legacy. But two scientists exploring which items from our technological civilisation are most likely to survive for many millions of years as fossils have reached an ironic but instructive conclusion: fast food and fast fashion will be our everlasting geological signature. “Plastic will definitely be a signature ‘technofossil’, because it is incredibly durable, we are making massive amounts of it, and it gets around the entire globe,” says the palaeontologist Prof Sarah Gabbott, a University of Leicester expert on the way that fossils form. “So wherever those future civilisations dig, they are going to find plastic. There will be a plastic signal that will wrap around the globe.” Fast food containers dominate ocean plastic, but aluminium drinks cans will also be part of our legacy. Pure metals are exceptionally rare in the geological record, as they readily react to form new minerals, but the cans will leave a distinct impression. -“They’re going to be around in the strata for a long time and eventually you would expect little gardens of clay minerals growing in the space where the can was. It’s going to be a distinctive, new kind of fossil,” says the geologist Prof Jan Zalasiewicz, a leading proponent of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch that reflects the impact of modern humanity on the planet, who with Gabbott has written a book on technofossils, Discarded. Another fast food staple, chicken, is also destined for immortality. Bones are well known as fossils, but while those of modern broiler chickens are fragile – they are bred to live fast, dying fat and young – the sheer volume will ensure many survive into the geological record. At any moment, there are about 25 billion live chickens in the world, vastly more than the world’s most abundant wild bird, say Gabbott and Zalasiewicz, making them likely to be the most abundant bird in all of Earth’s history. The sudden appearance of vast numbers of a monstrous bird five times bigger than its wild forebear will certainly strike future palaeontologists. Clothes will also make an abrupt entry into humanity’s fossil record. For millennia, clothes were made from natural and easily rotted materials such as cotton, linen and silk. Today, the world’s growing population often wears mass-produced synthetic garments that are rapidly dumped.

"Geologists refer to concrete as a technofossil. Resistant to decay, fossilised traces of the material will be visible in many thousands of years’ time."