More Than 200 New Minerals Show We're In A Geological Age Of Our Own Making

On the surface, whether we're living in a new, man-made epoch or not seems like a largely academic thing. It's not like it's going to change your day-to-day life, right? But the fact that human activity could alter the Earth so much is a big deal, and that's not just for academics. It's our daily lives that would be the biggest cause of such an event. Evidence of a man-made epoch doesn't get much more solid than this.

Of more than 5,200 officially recognized minerals, 208 have been attached to human activity, forming in everything from shipwrecks to museum drawers.

The vast majority of these new minerals have shown up in the past 200 years. "This is a spike of mineral novelty that is so rapid... compared to the 4.5 bn year history of Earth," says Robert Hazen, a Carnegie Institution for Science researcher and co-author of a new study published in American Mineralogist. "This is a blink of an eye, it is just a surge and of course we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.”

Those 208 minerals don't even include things like laser crystals or concrete, which have been developed by humans. 

"Human ingenuity has led to a host of crystalline compounds that never before existed in the solar system, and perhaps in the universe," the study says. The research suggests that humans have started to form their own layer in the geological record – meaning these minerals will exist for billions of years to come.

While some of the minerals named in the study could also form naturally, many others were found in unlikely locations that wouldn't exist without humans. 

A few were found in mines, which provided just the right temperatures and humidity for the crystals to form. One, called abhurite (pictured), was discovered on tin ingots on a ship that sank off the coast of England in 1885. Another, calclacite, forms when minerals react with the chemicals in the oak wood of museum drawers. 

Still more minerals could be in the process of forming, the study notes. Waste dumps for electrical appliances are a particularly likely spot for new crystals to form.

"TVs have all these exotic phosphors they use, and magnets and all sorts of high-tech materials," Hazen told New Scientist. "When you start hydrating and oxidising them, you're going to start finding a lot of exotic new materials."

h/t The Guardian

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