Artificially created objects did not change the weight of the planet, but they greatly transformed it.
The mass of the artificial is approaching the mass of the living
Jan Zalasiewicz from the Department of Geology, University of Leicester and 24 colleagues from universities and scientific organizations in the UK, USA, Norway, Spain, Brazil, France, Germany, Kenya, Australia and Canada have calculated, what is the total weight of the artificially created objects. That is, factories, palaces, steamships, railways and highways, pipelines, dams, well, and all sorts of little things made of metals, plastic and wood. It turned out that this whole so-called technosphere "pulls" by 30 trillion tons. What scientists reported in the specialized journal Anthropocene Review.
While the artificial is inferior in weight to the living. But this is a temporary phenomenon. For a long time, the former only multiplies, and the latter is reduced - animals die out, trees are cut down. Over the 12 thousand years that have passed since the beginning of active farming, the number of trees decreased by 46 percent. Now people cut them at almost 15 billion pieces a year.
Let's estimate the current balance. There are about three trillion trees growing on our planet. They were recently counted by scientists from an international group led by Thomas Crowther of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology in Wageningen.
Let each tree weigh an average of 10 tons. Total - 30 trillion tons, the same as any artificial stuff. We add to them the weight of living organisms. Zalasievich's group determined it to be somewhere in the 2.5 trillion tons. This is not counting people. We all weigh, scientists believe, about 600 million tons - a mere trifle on a global scale. You can even ignore it.
People have enthusiastically increased and are increasing the weight of the technosphere
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In total, the difference between artificial and living does not exceed 3 trillion tons. By the end of the century, it may disappear.
By the way, techno-diversity is much richer than biodiversity. That is, there are already much more types of artificially made objects and objects than those created by nature. All sorts of things, including the one that has outlived its own and became techno-fossilized, according to the Zalasievich group, about a billion species. And there are about 9 billion living species. Man turned out to be more inventive than nature that gave birth to him. And very active in transforming the pristine surface of the Earth into man-made, wild landscapes into industrial ones.
Vladimir LAGOVSKY
