* . *
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
Friday, October 3, 2025
Earth-News
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    Taylor Swift Releases New Album The Life of a Showgirl : Listen and Read the Full Credits – Yahoo

    Taylor Swift Releases New Album The Life of a Showgirl : Listen and Read the Full Credits – Yahoo

    Toni Braxton Is Turning Her Biggest Hits Into Lifetime Movies – Yahoo

    Toni Braxton Is Turning Her Biggest Hits Into Lifetime Movies – Yahoo

    Major airline to offer new in-flight entertainment options for passengers – PennLive.com

    Major airline to offer new in-flight entertainment options for passengers – PennLive.com

    Penn State-Themed Restaurant and Entertainment Spot Happy Valley Live Set to Open in State College – StateCollege.com

    Penn State-Themed Restaurant and Entertainment Spot Happy Valley Live Set to Open in State College – StateCollege.com

    The Police Made Chart History With This 1979 Hit Nearly 50 Years Ago – Yahoo

    How The Police Changed Music Forever with Their Iconic 1979 Hit Nearly 50 Years Ago

    Good Deed Entertainment Acquires Worldwide Rights To Liza Mandelup’s Documentary ‘Caterpillar’ – Deadline

    Good Deed Entertainment Lands Global Rights to Liza Mandelup’s Captivating Documentary ‘Caterpillar

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    Technology Is Becoming More Important Than Humans In CX – No Jitter

    Technology Is Becoming More Important Than Humans In CX – No Jitter

    A Tech Expo Shows What China Can Make, but Not Who’ll Buy It All – The New York Times

    Inside China’s Tech Expo: Cutting-Edge Innovations Face Uncertain Demand

    Steampunk Metal Oval Technology Sense Sunglasses Personality Handmade Chain Multicolor Sunglasses UV400 – The San Joaquin Valley Sun

    Steampunk Metal Oval Sunglasses with Handmade Multicolor Chain – Bold UV400 Protection and Unique Style

    STELLA Automotive AI Appoints Fred Seidelman as Chief Technology Officer – Yahoo Finance

    STELLA Automotive AI Appoints Fred Seidelman as New Chief Technology Officer

    Saving Energy and Money with Smart Technology – Terms of Service with Clare Duffy – Podcast on CNN Podcasts – CNN

    Saving Energy and Money with Smart Technology – Terms of Service with Clare Duffy – Podcast on CNN Podcasts – CNN

    Four Strategic Signals Technology Leaders Are Tuning In To – SPONSOR CONTENT FROM ARM – Harvard Business Review

    Four Essential Strategic Signals Every Technology Leader Should Watch

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    Taylor Swift Releases New Album The Life of a Showgirl : Listen and Read the Full Credits – Yahoo

    Taylor Swift Releases New Album The Life of a Showgirl : Listen and Read the Full Credits – Yahoo

    Toni Braxton Is Turning Her Biggest Hits Into Lifetime Movies – Yahoo

    Toni Braxton Is Turning Her Biggest Hits Into Lifetime Movies – Yahoo

    Major airline to offer new in-flight entertainment options for passengers – PennLive.com

    Major airline to offer new in-flight entertainment options for passengers – PennLive.com

    Penn State-Themed Restaurant and Entertainment Spot Happy Valley Live Set to Open in State College – StateCollege.com

    Penn State-Themed Restaurant and Entertainment Spot Happy Valley Live Set to Open in State College – StateCollege.com

    The Police Made Chart History With This 1979 Hit Nearly 50 Years Ago – Yahoo

    How The Police Changed Music Forever with Their Iconic 1979 Hit Nearly 50 Years Ago

    Good Deed Entertainment Acquires Worldwide Rights To Liza Mandelup’s Documentary ‘Caterpillar’ – Deadline

    Good Deed Entertainment Lands Global Rights to Liza Mandelup’s Captivating Documentary ‘Caterpillar

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    Technology Is Becoming More Important Than Humans In CX – No Jitter

    Technology Is Becoming More Important Than Humans In CX – No Jitter

    A Tech Expo Shows What China Can Make, but Not Who’ll Buy It All – The New York Times

    Inside China’s Tech Expo: Cutting-Edge Innovations Face Uncertain Demand

    Steampunk Metal Oval Technology Sense Sunglasses Personality Handmade Chain Multicolor Sunglasses UV400 – The San Joaquin Valley Sun

    Steampunk Metal Oval Sunglasses with Handmade Multicolor Chain – Bold UV400 Protection and Unique Style

    STELLA Automotive AI Appoints Fred Seidelman as Chief Technology Officer – Yahoo Finance

    STELLA Automotive AI Appoints Fred Seidelman as New Chief Technology Officer

    Saving Energy and Money with Smart Technology – Terms of Service with Clare Duffy – Podcast on CNN Podcasts – CNN

    Saving Energy and Money with Smart Technology – Terms of Service with Clare Duffy – Podcast on CNN Podcasts – CNN

    Four Strategic Signals Technology Leaders Are Tuning In To – SPONSOR CONTENT FROM ARM – Harvard Business Review

    Four Essential Strategic Signals Every Technology Leader Should Watch

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
Earth-News
No Result
View All Result
Home News

No One Can Agree on Whether a New Kind of Rock Is Actually a Rock at All

April 27, 2024
in News
No One Can Agree on Whether a New Kind of Rock Is Actually a Rock at All
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

Science

A new kind of geological object is washing up on beaches. Geologists can’t agree on what to call it.

A woman examines green plastic attached to rocks.

Geologist Fernanda Avelar Santos examines a “plastic rock” at a lab of the University of Parana in Brazil in 2023.
Photo by Rodrigo Fonseca/AFP via Getty Images.

Hawaii’s Kamilo Beach is also called “plastic beach” due to its high volume of trash. Patricia Corcoran, a geologist at Western university, went there to study not the sand, not the trash, but something in between: a material that formed when plastic melted in campfires along the beach, mixing with other material, and hardening into a novel sort of mass.

She called the resulting “rocks” plastiglomerates, a name she coined in 2014. “It’s a mudstone-siltstone-sandstone conglomerate, but the matrix holding everything together is plastic. It’s the perfect word,” Corcoran says.

Today, the strange conglomerate “rocks” have been found in more than a dozen locations around the world. But no one really agrees on what to call them. Corcoran’s original plastiglomerates phrase has been used by other geologists, to some extent. They have also been dubbed “plasticrust,” “plastistone,” and “anthropoquinas,” a nod to the fact that the rocks form due to human activity. It’s not just the technical name that’s under dispute. Geologists can’t even agree on whether these “rocks” are rocks at all.

The assumption that rocks have to be old and hard is an “urban legend,” says geologist Jan Zalasiewicz. He is a former head of the Anthropocene Working Group, which has been pushing for the declaration of a new geological age, the Anthropocene, in which humans have become the most powerful force reshaping Earth.

Zalasiewicz points out that some rocks originate as liquid, as when lava cools and solidifies into igneous rocks; these rocks form quickly. Others, like shale, can be peeled apart by hand; these rocks are incredibly frail. No geologist would dispute that shale and igneous rocks are rocks.

Scientists should consider plastic, now a ubiquitous feature of the ocean, a kind of mineral, Zalasiewicz says. He compares plastic to amber, a rock formed from fossilized tree resin, which he calls its close geological equivalent. Though amber is chemically different from most plastics, it is also made of complex long-chain organic molecules that can survive for millions of years when buried in the ground.

Also on team “they’re rocks”: Fernanda Avelar Santos, a Brazilian geologist and marine biologist who coined the term “plastistone” in 2022. Santos, like Zalasiewicz, says plastistones are part of a “paradigm shift” in how we think about geology in a heavily polluted world. The name she picked aligns with other rock types, like sandstone, mudstone, and limestone. A research team at Tsinghua University in China also calls plastistone “an emerging type of sedimentary rock.”

Other geologists are not convinced. Those other stones all notably formed from naturally occurring sediment (which plastic, notoriously, is not). When it comes to “plastistones,” or whatever you wish to call them, “I don’t know if it’s even reasonable to call them rocks,” says Steven Earle, author of the textbook Physical Geology. “Rocks have to be consolidated, and they should stand the test of time.”

A material like amber is formed over tens of thousands of years, when the heat and pressure of overlaying sediment causes a complex chemical reaction resulting in the resin-like stone. Plastic has only been around for about a hundred years and became popular in the mid-20th century—not long enough for it to become a permanent part of the rock record.

Because we don’t know how plastic will behave thousands of years from now, Earle says, they may be a less permanent part of our geological record than some geologists suggest.

“I refuse to call it a rock and would correct whoever asked me,” says Corcoran. Her reasoning: a rock by definition is made up of naturally occurring minerals, which plastic is not. “Oftentimes, people—especially young scientists—want to call old discoveries by new names to sensationalize them,” she says.

For Zalasiewicz, though, calling a plastic rock a rock is a matter not of sensationalism, but of accepting a new reality for what it is. Plastiglomerates are a signal of the ubiquity of plastic, a sign that we are entering a truly new era of the planet in which the old rules do not always hold. “The surprise for geologists,” Zalasiewicz says, “is how quickly plastic has become part of geology, not just part of the visible world around us.”

Plastics are enmeshed in our world, now. Microplastics have been found in even the most remote corners of the Earth, such as the Mariana Trench, the deepest oceanic trench on the planet. An estimated 170 trillion plastic particles are floating in the ocean and could outweigh fish by 2050.

But whether plastic “rocks” will end up as a layer in the permanent record of the Earth, whether geologists thousands of years from now will be able to dig them up, is an open question. Corcoran hopes to explore that question by placing plastiglomerates under “metamorphic conditions” in a lab—with heat, pressure, and a bath of mineral-rich fluids, all the factors that help true rock become solidified into the rock record.

She does agree that plastic rock hybrids, however they behave in those conditions, and whatever you want to call them, are indeed a sign of the impact that humans and our plastics are having on the world around us. “It’s all just semantics,” she says. “I don’t let it get to me, because the message is what’s important and not really their nomenclature, right?” The fact that the rocks exist is horrifying in and of itself. It’s a little concerning that we have to have this debate at all.

Climate Change

Research

Science

Ocean

>>> Read full article>>>
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source : Slate News – https://slate.com/technology/2024/04/anthropocene-plastic-rocks-pollution-geology.html?via=rss

Tags: ‘agreenewsWhether
Previous Post

A Supreme Court Justice Gave Us Alarming New Evidence That He’s Living in MAGA World

Next Post

Three Year Letterman HILARIOUSLY Mocks Protester Tackle in Epic Takedown

Bhagwat rings ‘warning bell’ on Himalayas, ecology threats – Times of India

Bhagwat rings ‘warning bell’ on Himalayas, ecology threats – Times of India

October 3, 2025
117-Year-Old Woman’s Diet Could Help Us All Live Longer – ScienceAlert

117-Year-Old Woman’s Diet Could Help Us All Live Longer – ScienceAlert

October 3, 2025
The Best Time to Eat Breakfast, Backed by Science—and Why It Matters More Than You Think – Real Simple

The Ideal Time to Eat Breakfast: Surprising Science-Backed Reasons Why It Matters

October 3, 2025
Lifestyle and stress erode heart health advantage in long-term US immigrants – News-Medical

Lifestyle and stress erode heart health advantage in long-term US immigrants – News-Medical

October 3, 2025
Artificial Intelligence Technology Solutions Deploys RIO Security Solutions – TipRanks

Artificial Intelligence Technology Solutions Unveils Game-Changing RIO Security Innovations

October 3, 2025
Top-12 NFL running games: Which teams are helping our RBs score fantasy football points this season? – Yahoo Sports

Top-12 NFL running games: Which teams are helping our RBs score fantasy football points this season? – Yahoo Sports

October 3, 2025
FIRST LOOK: Official match ball of FIFA World Cup ‘26 – Yahoo Sports

Get an Exclusive First Look at the Official Match Ball of FIFA World Cup 2026!

October 3, 2025
Arts economy grows, but funding lags on Long Island – Long Island Business News

Long Island’s Arts Economy Thrives Despite Ongoing Funding Challenges

October 3, 2025
Taylor Swift Releases New Album The Life of a Showgirl : Listen and Read the Full Credits – Yahoo

Taylor Swift Releases New Album The Life of a Showgirl : Listen and Read the Full Credits – Yahoo

October 3, 2025
HIV pioneer Dr. William Valenti retires, leaving lasting impact on health community – 13wham.com

HIV Pioneer Dr. William Valenti Retires, Leaving an Enduring Impact on the Health Community

October 3, 2025

Categories

Archives

October 2025
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  
« Sep    
Earth-News.info

The Earth News is an independent English-language daily published Website from all around the World News

Browse by Category

  • Business (20,132)
  • Ecology (849)
  • Economy (869)
  • Entertainment (21,743)
  • General (17,386)
  • Health (9,912)
  • Lifestyle (882)
  • News (22,149)
  • People (871)
  • Politics (880)
  • Science (16,080)
  • Sports (21,370)
  • Technology (15,852)
  • World (852)

Recent News

Bhagwat rings ‘warning bell’ on Himalayas, ecology threats – Times of India

Bhagwat rings ‘warning bell’ on Himalayas, ecology threats – Times of India

October 3, 2025
117-Year-Old Woman’s Diet Could Help Us All Live Longer – ScienceAlert

117-Year-Old Woman’s Diet Could Help Us All Live Longer – ScienceAlert

October 3, 2025
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

Go to mobile version