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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/feb/22/technofossils-how-plastic-bags-and-chicken-bones-will-become-our-eternal-legacy>
"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.
“We are making them in ridiculous amounts,” says Gabbott – about 100bn garments
a year, double the number 20 years ago. “People would be surprised just how
many clothes are actually out there in the environment as well. I work to clean
rivers in the city of Leicester and about a quarter of the stuff that we take
out is clothing. We also stick them into landfills, which are like giant
mummification tombs.” As the geologists say in their book: “It is already clear
that much of modern fashion will end up being, in the deepest possible sense,
truly timeless.”
The last of the signature technofossils is also the most solid example:
concrete. It is already essentially a rock, so it is readily preserved, and it
exists in colossal quantities. Enough concrete is cast each year to provide
four tonnes to every person on Earth, adding to the existing 500bn tonne
stockpile."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
