It is in vain to accuse humanity that it only rakes and sucks out everything useful from the earth. It turns out that we are replacing it with something new.
A team of geologists from the University of Arizona, the University of Maine, and the Carnegie Institute for Natural Sciences, led by Robert Hazen, have come up with an interesting theory.
Their findings, drawn from an analysis of human impact on ecosystems, can comfort anyone. Even after mankind cedes living space to the robots they have created or throws themselves with nuclear weapons, its trace on the planet will remain forever. Since about the 19th century, we have been intensively creating new minerals and sprinkling them all around.
The most striking example is a mineral called tinnunculite. Its deposits were found in Kuzbass, Kopeisk and on the Rasvumchorr plateau on the Kola Peninsula. For a long time, geologists could not understand where this strange stone came from, which had never been found anywhere before. And when they understood, they urgently went to wash their hands. It turned out that this is bird droppings, which accumulate at the entrances to coal mines, and then baked under the influence of burning methane during fires. But Hazen and his colleagues believe that we have enriched nature with more than baked droppings. Cement that accumulates in thick layers like limestone, slag from ore mines, deposits of ash and ash near factories and factories, the remains of isotopes from atomic explosions, even steel hulls of ships at the bottom of the ocean – all this remains for centuries, compresses and forms previously unknown compounds …
Scientists say that all this wealth can be considered a “golden nail” – as they call the geological layers that mark the change of historical eras. As, for example, sediments at the border of the Cretaceous and Cenozoic, containing traces of a meteorite, the alleged killer of dinosaurs. Scientists suggest that we have entered the Anthropocene – a new geological era, in which we begin to form not only public opinion and fashion for lilac, but also the mineral composition of the Earth. How long this era will last before we ourselves are part of this mineral composition is another matter.
By the way, read: “12 apocalypses that never happened.”
Photo: Getty Images
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