DISCARDED

What will remain of our plastic cans and other junk long after humans have vanished What kind of fossils will we leave as relics into the far future A blizzard of new objects has suddenly appeared on Earth plastic bottles ballpoint pens concrete flyways outsize chicken bones aluminium cans teabags mobile phones T shirts They re produced for our comfort and pleasure then quickly discarded The number of our constructions has exploded to outweigh the whole living world This new made treasure chest underpins our lives But it is also giving a completely new style of fossilization to our planet as hyper diverse and hyper rapidly evolving technofossils spin out of our industrialized economy Designed to resist sun wind rain corrosion and decay and buried in soils seafloor muds and the gigantic middens of our landfill sites many will remain petrified as future geology What will these technofossils look like in future rock How long will they last and how will they change as they lie underground for decades then millennia then millions of years Discarded describes how they transform as they are attacked by bacteria baked by the Earth s inner heat squashed by overlying rock permeated by subterranean fluids crumpled by mountain building m