University of Leicester paleontologists Sarah Gabbott and Jan Zalasiewicz have published a new book on how all the different kinds of so-called technofossils — such as plastic bottles, patios, mobile phones, old socks, ballpoint pens and a host of other things — will fossilize into the far future.
Wind turbine blades, made from difficult to recycle materials, may be among the most surprising fossils found by future paleontologists. Image credit: Gemini AI.
In their book, Discarded: How Technofossils Will be Our Ultimate Legacy, the authors explore what different human-made items will look like following thousands to millions of years subjected to natural processes in.
But one technofossil that might really turn heads among far-future paleontologists as they explore the extraordinary layers of the human epoch are the relics of wind turbines.
“The fossils won’t be of the towers, by and large — those are made of metal, which can be recycled,” Professor Zalasiewicz said.
“The enormous wind turbine blades, though, are made of materials like fiberglass and epoxy resin and carbon fibers, which are terribly hard to recycle — but easy to fossilize.”
“As wind turbines reach end-of-life and are decommissioned, huge landfills of the 50-m-long-plus blades, sliced into truck-length segments and neatly stacked side by side, are appearing and growing.”
“Some will stay buried for millions of years — and, if finally erosion-revealed and stumbled upon by some curious far-future paleontologist, will be an amazing sight, like a graveyard of gigantic, hollow, sawn-up bones.”
“Some may be squashed and crumpled by earth movements, and others may be filled with mineral growths, but their striking shape and enormous size will shine out of the layers.”
“For our far-future explorers, they will be a huge puzzle — will they be able to tell that they were built to catch the wind, and to provide energy that is clean and renewable?”
“Perhaps they will, if they can piece them together — like we reconstruct huge dinosaur skeletons today — to see their aerodynamic shapes.”
“They will be only one puzzle among the millions we leave behind in our daily lives (and we suspect they would also find the more sinister fossils left by fossil fuel burning).”
“There’s been nothing like this emerging new fossil cornucopia in the Earth’s four and a half billion-year history.”
“And right now, we should begin to understand this amazing, if often toxic, legacy that we are leaving for the planet.”
“Knowing how our myriad discarded objects will fossilize into the far future can help us deal with the growing mountains of trash we live among today.”
The authors also describe, for the general reader, the kind of science that is emerging to show the far-future human footprint on Earth.
It offers a different perspective upon fossils and fossilization, one that expands the idea of what people think of as fossils, and what they can tell us.
“It’s been a real adventure to use our understanding of how fossils form in the past and now apply it to the very new world of what we call technofossils,” Professor Gabbott said.
“But then we were asked a really tricky question, What will the most surprising technofossil that we leave behind, millions (or billions) of years from now?”
“There are so many candidates to rival wind turbines for the ‘weirdest human-made fossil of all time’.”
“There are, for instance, the myriad different shapes that a pair of Y-fronts can take when pressed within layers (and yes, we do explore that very particular question in the book).”
“There are the tiny, but very distinctive — and very hard-wearing — fossil smoke particles that come out of our power stations.”
“There are the strange stories of tea-bags, and of chicken feathers, non-stick pans, the minute patterns on silicon chips, the copper wires that wrap around the globe, and much more.”
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Sarah Gabbott & Jan Zalasiewicz. 2025. How Technofossils Will be Our Ultimate Legacy. OUP Oxford
