Earth is covered with technofossils, or man-made materials, that will last for centuries and maybe even longer.
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.
Discarded is part paleontological study and part call to arms. In the past 70 years, humanity has manufactured so many objects that our human-made output now outweighs the mass of the living world and, according to some metrics, far surpasses it in terms of diversity. Although some of our stuff will decay—natural-fiber clothing, for instance, has a very small chance of surviving millions of years into the future—many of the things we purchase will not disintegrate, instead entering fossil records of the future.
