Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
The rock cycle naturally takes thousands to millions of years, but scientists just identified a new form of rock that cements in under four decades.
Researchers believe the natural cements found in industrial waste react with the ocean, leading to rapid cementation.
Experts were able to estimate the cementation timeline using modern objects found in the rock, some of which include a zipper, a King Charles V coin, and a soda tab.
Fossils are amazing; not only can they spark inspiration for iconic movie franchises (I’m looking at you, Jurassic Park), but they more importantly also provide accurate timestamps that help researchers piece together history from across millennia. Incredibly, scientists are starting to find examples of a new kind of fossil—well, sort of. Researchers from the University of Glasgow found modern society’s detritus, including things like soda tabs, cemented inside a new form of rock. Published in the journal Geology, the study reconsiders everything we know about the rock cycle and how humans affect it.
Typically, rocks take thousands to millions of years to form, with processes like heating, compaction, and melting producing different types of rock over long periods of time. The recent study, however, found that the anthropoclastic rock cycle is forming rocks in just 35 years rather than hundreds. Researchers realized this when they were studying slag deposits—or byproducts from industrial production—at Derwent Howe in West Cumbria.
The region was formerly home to steel and iron-making plants, and scientists noticed irregular formations in the coastal cliffs, leading them to investigate 13 different sites in the area. Using methods including electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, and Raman spectroscopy (chemical analysis), the team determined the slag is made of “natural cements” like calcite, goethite, and brucite. They explain in the study that the rapid cementation is likely a reaction between the waste and the sea water.
Researchers were able to pinpoint just how rapid this new rock formation is by using the “anthropogenic material”—or, more simply put, modern junk—they found hiding inside the rock.
“We found both a King George V coin from 1934 and an aluminium can tab with a design that we realised couldn’t have been manufactured before 1989 embedded in the material,” John MacDonald, co-author of the study, explained in a press release. “This gives us a maximum time frame of 35 years for this rock formation, well within the course of a single human lifetime.”
Other discoveries include a zipper, copper wire, and even a tire.
“This is an example in microcosm of how all the activity we’re undertaking at the Earth’s surface will eventually end up in the geological record as rock,” MacDonald continued, “but this process is happening with remarkable, unprecedented speed.”
Researchers also expressed the environmental concerns the new rock form poses. The study suggests that we don’t have as much time to dispose of loose waste material as we previously believed—and it only gets worse after it hardens. According to experts, excess anthropoclastic rocks could affect life both above and below the water’s surface, especially as coastal ecosystems change with rising sea levels.
“What’s remarkable here is that we’ve found these human-made materials being incorporated into natural systems and becoming lithified—essentially turning into rock—over the course of decades instead,” co-author Amanda Owen said in the release. “It challenges our understanding of how a rock is formed, and suggests that the waste material we’ve produced in creating the modern world is going to have an irreversible impact on our future.”
While this isn’t the first time the anthropoclastic rock cycle was recorded, it is the first time researchers could put a definitive timeline on the process. The team explained in the release that the effects of anthropoclastic rock aren’t currently included in models of erosion and land management, which are crucial parts of combating climate change. In the future, the researchers hope to study more deposits throughout Europe and further understand the rapid anthropoclastic rock cycle.
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