Slag heap debris on the English coast has apparently been fusing into a new kind of sedimentary rock.
A team of geologists studying the beach recently “found a series of outcrops made from an unfamiliar type of sedimentary rock. The beach used to be sandy, so the rock must have been a recent addition. It was clearly clastic, meaning it was composed of fragments of other rocks and minerals (clasts) that have been cemented together in layers. On closer inspection, they found that the clasts were derived from the slag heap.” Based on inclusions of trash amongst the sediments, such as a discarded coin, some of this rock could not have been more than 36 years old.
It’s accelerated geology, part of what the researchers describe in their resulting paper as “a rapid anthropoclastic rock cycle,” one where a new class of geological material is “forming over decadal time scales rather than thousands to millions of years.”
These new coasts are likely forming elsewhere in the world, New Scientist adds: “Slag waste is a global phenomenon, and it is probably being turned to rock anywhere it comes into contact with ocean waves.” Let’s go find and map some more! The anthro-littoral, or geology itself as an archaeological artifact.
Crusted scablands of industrial coral, bulbous and pockmarked, herniate into the sea, long after the creatures who forged those materials have gone.
I happened across what looked like a giant meteor in a crater in an old mining area in Ayrshire a few years back – what it actually seems to have been is slag/spoil from the coalmine that had fused together when the coal debris in the slag had caught fire – it would apparently burn for quite some time if it happened to catch fire and fuse the rock debris together. The loser material in the heap had since been quarried away to use has hardcore to build farm tracks exposing and leaving behind these huge fused boulders in the middle of a manmade crater.
Theres also curious archeological features in the region – ‘vitrified’ dry stone hill forts where the lose stone appears to have been fused together by intense heat. Given the coal seams in the area are often quite shallow I wonder coal mixed with the stone intentionally or otherwise had the same effect