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There's some beauty on it. Nature incorporates our garbage, and it becomes part of nature.
It might kill us, but then new creatures will evolve and grow, with plastic being part of their ecosystem, perhaps even desirable. In million years the future civilization of these creatures might have "plastic preservation programs" because the old plastic rocks are a finite resource upon witch their culture was built.
They might even gaze upon their plastic-filled oceans in awe, with some quasi-religious gratitude for the ancient race that gracefully filled the world with plastic that they might thrive.
We are not the first species to trash the biosphere. When trees came up with lignin it took Earth life some millions of years to adapt to this new invention and still it was left with a layer of biological trash currently known as coal.
Another example is oxygen. Highly corrosive gas that early on in Earth's existance was rare, but some organisms excreted it as a wastproduct of their metabolism. It got so bad that high concentration of oxygen in atmosphere wiped nearly all life on earth until the life adapted.
And now came humans, who utilize the heaps and volumes of trash and waste left by other species. And produce their own that will stay on Earth for many millenia, long after humans in modern sense are gone.
Wow, now I want to gather bottles and throw them in the ocean. I kid of course, but that’s sorta beautiful.
I always knew someone would see me as a god despite what my wife says.
Then again, they might not.
Yup, good old George Carlin thought that way:
"might kill us, but then new creatures will evolve and grow, with plastic being part of their ecosystem, perhaps even desirable."
Is that possible? As far as I know nothing consumes rocks and they've been around forever.
Terrible take.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the "this is fine" comments here, but I am. Geological changes happen in geological time (outside of massive disruptive events). This change happened in 100 years. Also, comparing this to clay pots is simply not understanding the scale of modern production and waste. It's like saying a forest fire doesn't pose any problem to my house because I lit a match one time.
I guess I neither feel that "this is fine" or "this is terrifying".
The truth is we ultimately don't know what the consequences will be. To your analogy, this really could be more of a match than a forest fire. We just don't know.
I'm not trying to be dismissive though... It's concerning for sure, but I don't think we know enough to be terrified. Although, I'm happy to be corrected.
"The planet is fine. The people are fucked."
I think this counts against the Silurian Hypothesis. If a previous technical civilization existed on earth millions of years ago, by now we would have already found its plastic rocks. Those appears ours.
I think the silurian hypothesis still holds. It's unlikely that these plastic rocks would remain in their current form for the next x million years.
Or they never used oil. Or better managed their use, with no waste of the form.
Not to say I believe a iota in such an hypothesis though.
On a long enough timescale, any trace of a precursor civilization would be taken into the earth's crust through tectonic shifts; still curious to think about though.
Closer to today would be Atlantis, if it was an island then it might still be somewhere under the sea / sediment.
This is one of the better outcomes for plastics floating around in the oceans that I can think of. Melted and lumped into rocks it won't tangle living organisms, and it should be more inert than if it were ground into micro-particles due to far less surface area.
It's even more beautiful than tangled nets and other plastic debris.
I'm not trying to defend it mind you, we really really need to do a better job of keeping plastic out of the oceans.
> we really really need to do a better job of keeping plastic out of the oceans
This was really hammered home to me on a trip I took a couple of months ago. I was on an uninhabited island and, while the island as a whole was beautiful, the beaches were all COVERED in plastic debris from the high-tide line upwards. It was really quite shocking to see.
I knew that there's a lot of plastic floating in the oceans, but I hadn't considered how much of it gets washed ashore. It doesn't accumulate if there's someone around to clean it up, but in uninhabited areas it's devastating. I wouldn't have believed how bad things are if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.
I wrote about the whole trip here, scroll down about halfway for a photo of what I'm talking about:
The largest contributors for plastic inputs to oceans are commercial fishing and a few rivers in Asia.[1]
I often feel powerless when a call to action is cloaked with the phrase "we must do ${something}" Some data at least gives me a concrete talking point if I ever talk to my local congress /parliament representative.
Did you look at the article- it is tangled nets mixed with sand/stones. They still look capable of snagging small creatures. The location is next to a turtle nesting site.
the effect of having plastic merged with rocks is unknown, its bewildering to see comments romanticizing it, akin to those staring in awe of the green sky during chernobyl
I have to bite my tongue every time people wonder at the brilliant red sunsets.
That's pollution, friends.
took the words right from my brain
I sometimes help an organizations that monitors the health of a river, a couple of years ago they started buying plastic buoys because the ones made from metal were a bit more expensive.
Does that seem like a major environmental issue to you? Are they leaving those buoys as trash there? I’m not sure I understand the concern.
We are so fucked
Sadly it seems we're taking down a lot of other creatures with us.
Not saying this is good news, but given the current amount of plastic floating around in the oceans, isn't aggregating as a big chunk better for the environment[1] than disintegrating into micro-plastics or small debris?
[1] excluding the "no plastics in the ocean" choice, of course
Aggregating in one big chunk can be good news, if it is treated as a garbage collector and if the garbage is removed. If the plastic isn't removed, then it will be an eternal source of microplastics. I can't see how that is a good thing, unless some fish, bacteria or plant knows how to eat that plastic and make it into something harmless. I doubt that this will act like a plastic-magnet for the microplastics in the area.
Does this article deserve some skepticism? Will fishing nets really melt like that? It looks like they took some oven waste and put it in the oven. If plastics were melting like this in nature, wouldn’t we have seen a lot of it, all over the warm parts of the planet, by now?
I agree on the skepticism. The article says that these fishing nets just melted on the beach from high temperature, but there is no beach on earth that I've heard of where temperatures are hot enough to melt plastic. 56°C is the world record temperature, not hot enough.
The origin of these melted plastic blobs are what's interesting. People here treat the discovery as some kind of warning against pollution, but it's an oddity: something that has been found in only one place.
I think you missed the part where the island is an active volcano.
Aside from fire hazard probability, are there any studies done about whether plastics fused with rocks (cement) could be a good material for building houses that are resistant to earthquakes? (Not discarding the use of steel)
There's quite a few instances where they take plastic and incorporate it into bricks, cement or ground cover, e.g. https://phys.org/news/2022-03-trash-kenyan-inventor-plastic-...; if you don't mind videos, Business Insider has a decent series on subjects like this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmur3Z0Afau7p-Au2E1uY...
If concrete mixed with plastics is a good idea, then it should be done in a controlled environment (factory), not taken from the sea. I don't see what this has to do with earthquake resistant building. If you want some "flex" in building materials, we already have steel. If plastic can replace steel, or can replace it partly, that would be great. Mixing plastic with concrete is environmentally a bad idea in the long run. How are you going to undo that mix later?
Wow, I guess George Carlin was right about this one too.
I think so. Maybe Tardigrades will find some use for it..
We don't call it the Anthropocene for nothing.
Good or bad, this is kind of cool.
The most common way of distinguishing periods of geological time is by means of the fossils they contain. On this basis picking out the Anthropocene in the rocks of days to come will be pretty easy. Cities will make particularly distinctive fossils. A city on a fast-sinking river delta (and fast-sinking deltas, undermined by the pumping of groundwater and starved of sediment by dams upstream, are common Anthropocene environments) could spend millions of years buried and still, when eventually uncovered, reveal through its crushed structures and weird mixtures of materials that it is unlike anything else in the geological record.
This shouldn’t be surprising. We as a society really like plastic stuff and really like pretending our actions as individuals don’t have consequences.
It’s like the hotdog meme guy.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/were-all-trying-to-find-the-g...
Individual action alone cannot stem climate change and mass plastic pollution. All the cheapest food is packaged in single-use plastic. All the cheapest clothes and toys are made of plastic. One simply cannot opt out of this system without making massive, potentially ostrasizing changes to one's life. Many/most cannot afford fancy plastic-free goods.
Most plastic pollution in the ocean is directly related to shipping and in particular fishing[0]. Nothing I can do individually can address this, change must come from World leaders and industry bodies working in good faith across international borders. They all know this is happening, they all know measures that could be taken to address it.
Much of the framing of climate change and pollution as individual responsibility comes from large industry bodies themselves, who would much rather you feel guilty about it personally rather than wonder if they might be to blame.[1]
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-f...
[1]: Plastic Recycling is an Actual Scam | Climate Town https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g
If this plastic didn't decompose due to salty water and sunrays into smaller parts, isn't that actually convenient for us, since it is unlikely to get out of the rocks and cause harm?
Zzz...
If a modern chemical plant is sloppy with $Stable_Chemical, then it's no surprise to find that chemical in the ground under it, in the groundwater, etc.
The bottom of the Mediterranean is littered with thousands-of-years-old pottery fragments from ancient shipwrecks and such.
Coal mining is a thing, all over the world, because microorganisms mostly couldn't break down dead trees back during the Carboniferous Era - ~300 million years ago.
The sedimentary process how the Earth deals with ~anything that water doesn't dissolve, and microorganisms & such can't break down. That has not been news since 4 or so billion years ago.
> Microplastics/plastics found everywhere ~100 years after its invention, disrupting life
> yeah it's just like trees over millions of years
The process being logical doesn't mean it's not worrying, especially when you look at the scale and pace of it
This is true, but waiting around millions of years for a new global ecological steady state to form, when the underlying causes of these problems are knowable and preventable, is needlessly painful, to state it mildly.
We’re not having our blood poisoned from the remnants of clay pots and trees.
Is the material that pottery is composed of dangerous? How many shipwrecks occurred where pots were lost compared to the amount of plastics we produce today that end up in the ocean?
Terrifying, really? Terraforming, maybe, but it seems a little hysterical to react with terror to this phenomenon.
It’s just melted plastic from fishing nets and other debris