Fossils of last dinosaurs drowning in mud haunt us. What extreme weather event triggered that, or were they too weak to climb out a watering hole? A post by Clair Marshall caused those thoughts to linger. What will be our last legacy be after extinction, if indeed it happens
Are Piles of Trash Our Legacy after Extinction?
Human extinction means the total eradication of our species. Others that follow will find more than the Strandloper mizzens the Khoikhoi tribe left behind on the shores of Cape Town. They were unable to adapt to demographic and economic change after settlers arrived. Will we adapt to the climate?
Clair Marshall thinks our post extinction monuments will comprise an avalanche of rubbish dumped on and in the under-land beneath our feet. This includes mountains of garbage tipped down mine shafts, and nuclear waste disposal sites in tunnels. Some say we are a brilliantly terrible species busy destroying our paradise, our Eden.
Much of the Ice Will Be Gone Forever
Explorer-writer Robert MacFarlane has been voyaging in his hidden under-world, “going back in deep time”. The places he visits measure in “millennia, epochs and eons, instead of minutes, months and years”. He went down an ice fissure to see what was there.
After he abseiled down 60 feet, a torrent of melt water almost overwhelmed him before he signaled to get him out of there. “It felt like being inside a vast alien creature… a humming blue tube,” he remembers. “The sense of rapidity and change up there is enormous,” he says. “At the moment, the fate of the ice is the fate of us.
“We need to see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy, stretching over millions of years past and millions to come.” “This brings us to consider what we are leaving behind after extinction for the epochs and beings that will follow”.
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Preview Image: Onkalo Spent Nuclear Fuel Repository in Finland
