Rock of Ages

January 26, 2024 7:33 PM

A Strange Plastic Rock Has Ominously Invaded 5 Continents That probably shouldn't have happened.

Plastics are now also infecting the Earth’s geology—so much that experts are now calling to formally recognize a new kind of sedimentary rock: plastistone.

posted by stevil (12 comments total)

I clicked through thinking this would be about those "hide-a-key" fake rocks having found a market around the world.

Close, but no cigar.
posted by hippybear at 7:46 PM on January 26 [2 favorites]

As usual when it comes to Anthropocene-related topics, I find myself turning to George Carlin for some (questionable but darkly amusing) perspective:

If it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: The Earth Plus Plastic (starting at 1:29). The Earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the Earth, the Earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children! Could be the only reason the Earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place - it wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old philosophical question, "Why are we here?"

Truly an ecological visionary.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:03 PM on January 26 [17 favorites]

Carlin's skit was also the first thing I went to.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 8:31 PM on January 26 [1 favorite]

"Arenaceous plastistone with argillaceous and plasticky matrix. Fine, sub-rounded, sub-angular sand grains in very dark grey claystone with up to 60% finely disseminated bright orange plastic. Interpreted to be a fossil turbidite fan incorporating large quantities of a single production run of Garfield toys lost in a shipwreck."
We can deal with this.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:32 PM on January 26 [13 favorites]

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but an “oops.”
posted by Devils Rancher at 9:45 PM on January 26 [12 favorites]

one word
posted by chavenet at 3:09 AM on January 27 [1 favorite]

[geologist Fernanda Avelar] Santos, who originally discovered the plastistones on Trinidade Island, understands the confusion, saying at the time that “human interventions are now so pervasive that one has to question what is truly natural."

Surely it's well past time for people capable of reasoning to drop the idea that humans are somehow not part of nature, from which error follows the complete falsehood that the science of ecology has nothing useful to tell us about us nor the effects we have on our habitats.
posted by flabdablet at 3:47 AM on January 27 [5 favorites]

Surely it's well past time for people capable of reasoning to drop the idea that humans are somehow not part of nature, from which error follows the complete falsehood that the science of ecology has nothing useful to tell us about us nor the effects we have on our habitats.

This is precisely why I have a graduate degree in geography and not ecology. I haven't kept up with the ecology literature, and I hope it's changed, but 25 years ago when I needed to make a decision, geographers had a better handle on this point.
posted by mollweide at 4:44 AM on January 27 [1 favorite]

But plastics aren’t happy just remaining in the form of a discarded shopping bag or McDonald’s straw—plastics tend to get everywhere. In fact, plastics are so ubiquitous, they reside in your body right now.

I don't really understand why people see this as an existential threat when it's clearly an immediate issue. But "out of site/out of mind" seems to be the guiding light on environmental policy.
posted by schmudde at 7:59 AM on January 27

Speaking of rocks with mixed origins, consider the stuff dubbed “rainbow calsilica,” a brilliantly-striped material sold to gem cutters. Turns out the only source was a deposit downstream of a ceramics factory. Layers of colored clays and glazes had fused to produce it. It still turns up in jewelry, usually represented as natural.
posted by kinnakeet at 8:50 AM on January 28 [2 favorites]

Hou and Wang note that these rocks usually form from land-based plastics (mainly bottles and containers) which are usually burned, either at something like a campfire or as part of the waste production process. This melted plastic debris is then “held within the mineral matrix when it cools down” in a process known as diagenesis.

I have definitely seen these in places where people have had fires, and I'm glad they now have a name.

As an urban ecologist, I'm a little concerned by the turn against ecology in this thread. The field of applied ecology is a robust one. The Ecological Society of America has been publishing the journal Ecological Applications since 1990. Socio-Environmental Systems is one of the hot areas of study right now, both indigenous systems and otherwise, explicitly recognizing that natural systems include people. Even the ecologists I know who work in less human impacted areas, including Antarctica, know that they are exactly that, less impacted not unimpacted and know (except in Antarctica) that indigenous people are explicitly part of these systems. We all know climate change exists. We all know about the ubiquity of microplastics and PCBs. I'm just not sure where the accusation that we think we study something separate from people is even coming from.

Now, whether anyone listens to ecologists or not is another thing. Most days, I'm content if my students at least know that the science of ecology is the subfield of biology that studies the interactions among organisms and between organisms and their environment, not electric cars and recycling.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:59 AM on January 29 [4 favorites]

I'm not anti-ecology at all. I consider myself at least as much of a landscape and historical ecologist as an environmental geographer. It's just that, from my personal perspective based on my experiences in the 1990s, it seemed like there was more space to explore human-environmental interactions in geography than in many ecology programs at the time. Even then, that was changing, but there still seemed to be some institutional inertia that favored microcosm studies or research that explicitly filtered out human-dominated systems. Maybe I just had an unrepresentative experience, but my friends and I talked about it often back then.
posted by mollweide at 7:54 AM on January 29