Wind turbine remains may be among ‘most surprising’ fossils for far future generations, palaeontologists say

Many of today’s everyday items are destined to become fossils after millions of years, but scientists have suggested that some of the most surprising of them might be wind turbine blades.

University of Leicester palaeontologists Professor Sarah Gabbott and Professor Jan Zalasiewicz have published a book on how all the different kinds of stuff that we make – plastic bottles, patios, mobile phones, old socks, ballpoint pens and a host of other things – will fossilise into the far future. 

Dubbed ‘technofossils’, the authors explore what these items will look like following thousands to millions of years subjected to natural processes in Discarded: How Technofossils Will be Our Ultimate Legacy.

But one fossil that might really turn heads among far-future palaeontologists as they explore the extraordinary strata of the human epoch are the relics of wind turbines.

Professor Jan Zalasiewicz, from the University’s School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, said: “The fossils won’t be of the towers, by and large – those are made of metal, which can be recycled. The enormous wind turbine blades, though, are made of materials like fibreglass and epoxy resin and carbon fibres, which are terribly hard to recycle – but easy to fossilise. 

“As wind turbines reach end-of-life and are decommissioned, huge landfills of the 50 metre-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 palaeontologist, 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 strata. 

“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 fossilise into the far future can help us deal with the growing mountains of trash we live among today.”

Discarded: How Technofossils Will be Our Ultimate Legacy describes, 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 fossilisation, one that expands the idea of what people think of as fossils, and what they can tell us.

Professor Sarah Gabbott from the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment said: “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. 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 strata (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.”

• Discarded: How Technofossils Will be Our Ultimate Legacy is published by Oxford University Press