Business Insider quotes Grew in article on lasting human-made changes to planet
Edward Grew, a research professor of geological sciences at the University of Maine, was quoted in the Business Insider article, “Humans have caused surprising changes to the planet that will be visible billions of years from now.” Grew helped write a recent paper that cataloged for the first time 208 new minerals that humans have left behind. The scientists’ work suggests that humans are responsible for roughly 4 percent of all the minerals on Earth — the most new materials to show up in the geologic record since oxygen appeared more than 2.2 billion years ago, according to the article. These materials will be visible for millions or even billions of years and will “mark our age as different from all that came before,” Grew said. Many of the new minerals were formed along the walls of mines, where cool, moist air reacts with sooty particles of iron ore, the article states. “When one looks at a mine, it’s really a disturbance of the Earth’s surface,” Grew said. “You’re just stirring a pot in a way, exposing ores to a different environment and getting these new minerals to form.”