Are humans really so tiny and insignificant that their activity makes no difference on climate? Some people say so but, if you are of this opinion, you might change your mind once you read how much human activities affect the Earth's crust. For instance, the amount of rock and soil we move every year would fill the whole Grand Canyon in about 50 years.
An excerpt from Ugo Bardi's "Depleting the Earth," a book being prepared in collaboration with the Club of Rome.
The amounts of minerals extracted nowadays is immense and it becomes even larger if consider as “mining” the use of fertile soil in agriculture which is consumed by the process called erosion. It is estimated that about 4 billion tons of agricultural soil are eroded in the United States alone and dumped into the oceans every year (1). In the whole world, the total amount has been estimated as 75 billion tons per year by Pimentel et al. (2) and as 120 billion tons per year by Hooke (3). These amounts dwarf those created by natural erosion, at least one order of magnitude smaller.
To this amount related to agriculture we must add the amount of rock and sand moved by the construction industry. From the USGS data, we find that the worldwide production of sand and gravel may exceed 15 billion tons per year. The total world production of concrete in 2008 has been of 2,8 billion tons. China, alone, produces more than a billion tons per year, that is about 450 kg per person on the average.
According to Bruce Wilkinson (4) we can visualize the total amount of rock and soil yearly moved by humans considering that these amounts are “ca. 18,000 times that of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption in Indonesia, ca. 500 times the volume of the Bishop Tuff in California and about 2 times the volume of Mount Fuji in Japan. At these rates, this amount of material would fill the Grand Canyon of Arizona in ca. 50 years.”
1 Azimut, 29 Jun 2011, John Baez http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2011/06/27/this-weeks-finds-week-315/ (Accessed 12 Aug 2011)
2 David Pimentel; C. Harvey; P. Resosudarmo; K. Sinclair; D. Kurz; M. McNair; S. Crist;. L. Shpritz; L. Fitton; R. Saffouri; R. Blair. 1995, Science, New Series, Vol. 267, p. 1117-1123
3 Hooke, R.L.B., 2000, On the history of humans as geomorphic agents, Geology, v. 28 p 843-846
4 Wilkinson, Bruce, 2005, “Humans as geologic agents: a deep-time perspective”, Geolog, 22 pp 161-164
