Human Impacts / Effects: Data & Statistics

[EnolaGaia]

NOTE: I'm starting a new thread because I can't find one this story clearly fits, though it touches on topics like resource exploitation, Anthropocene, environmental impacts, etc.

In case you've wondered how much artifice humans have generated and maintain ...

According to this article:

Scale and diversity of the physical technosphere: A geological perspective

http://anr.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/11/25/2053019616677743.full.pdf+html

... the human 'technosphere' (defined as "... the summed material output of the contemporary human enterprise") has a cumulative mass estimated at 30 trillion tonnes. For comparison, the human biomass this technosphere supports has an estimated mass of circa 0.3 billion tonnes.

 

[rynner2]

NOTE: I'm starting a new thread because I can't find one this story clearly fits, though it touches on topics like resource exploitation, Anthropocene, environmental impacts, etc.

It does indeed...

 

[EnolaGaia]

... the human 'technosphere' (defined as "... the summed material output of the contemporary human enterprise") has a cumulative mass estimated at 30 trillion tonnes. For comparison, the human biomass this technosphere supports has an estimated mass of circa 0.3 billion tonnes.

Update ... The total mass of human-produced artifacts and materials is now estimated to exceed earth's entire biomass (i.e., the mass of all living things on our planet).

Human-made materials may now outweigh all living things on Earth, report finds

From roads and buildings to cars and plastic, human civilization is built on lots of stuff.

But roughly how much stuff have we actually created? And in the process, how much of the natural world have we consumed or destroyed?

A new analysis finds that on both counts, it's a lot ... so much, in fact, that these materials may now outweigh all of the living things left on Earth.

The year 2020 could be the year when human-made mass surpasses the overall weight of biomass -- estimated to be roughly 1,100,000,000,000 tons, or 1.1 teratons -- a milestone scientists say speaks to the enormous impact that humans have had on the planet.

The analysis was published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature, and was conducted by a group of researchers from Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/world/human-made-mass-exceeds-biomass-report-2020/index.html

 

[EnolaGaia]

Here are the bibliographic details and abstract from the newly published research report ...

Elhacham, E., Ben-Uri, L., Grozovski, J. et al.
Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass.
Nature (2020).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5

Abstract
Humanity has become a dominant force in shaping the face of Earth. An emerging question is how the overall material output of human activities compares to the overall natural biomass. Here we quantify the human-made mass, referred to as ‘anthropogenic mass’, and compare it to the overall living biomass on Earth, which currently equals approximately 1.1 teratonnes. We find that Earth is exactly at the crossover point; in the year 2020 (± 6), the anthropogenic mass, which has recently doubled roughly every 20 years, will surpass all global living biomass. On average, for each person on the globe, anthropogenic mass equal to more than his or her bodyweight is produced every week. This quantification of the human enterprise gives a mass-based quantitative and symbolic characterization of the human-induced epoch of the Anthropocene.

SOURCE: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3010-5

 

[brownmane]

I just don't know what to think about this. It's sad. Humans change things so rapidly and no thought is given to the effect the changes have on the earth. The only hope that I can see in nature is when I see a dandelion (a common plant) pushing itself through a slab of concrete or asphalt.

 

[EnolaGaia]

The weight of major cities is sufficient to cause them to subside / sink as they deform the underlying lithosphere.

The Colossal Weight of Cities Is Making Them Sink, Even as Sea Levels Are Rising

Cities don't just have sea level rises to worry about – they're also slowly sinking under the weight of their own development, according to new research, which emphasises the importance of factoring subsidence into models of climate change risk.

Geophysicist Tom Parsons, from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) agency, looked at San Francisco as a case study of how large urban developments could be affecting and depressing the actual surface of the Earth.

By his calculations, San Francisco might have sunk as much as 80 millimetres (3.1 inches) as the city has grown over time. Considering the Bay Area is under threat from as much as 300 mm (11.8 inches) of sea level rise by 2050, the extra variation added by slow subsidence is significant enough to be concerning.

"As global populations move disproportionately toward the coasts, this additional subsidence in combination with expected sea level rise may exacerbate risk associated with inundation," writes Parsons in his paper.

Taking into account an inventory of all the buildings in the city and their contents, the study calculated the weight of the San Francisco Bay Area (population: 7.75 million) as being around 1.6 trillion kilograms – about 3.5 trillion pounds, or roughly 8.7 million Boeing 747s.

That could be enough to both bend the actual lithosphere on which the urban centre sits, and perhaps more significantly, to change the relative levels of fault blocks – the floating chunks of rock that make up Earth's surface.

In fact the 80 mm of slip is likely to be a conservative estimate, as the weight calculations didn't include things outside buildings – including transport infrastructure, vehicles, or people. The same sort of sinking is likely in other parts of the world, though it partially depends on the local geology.

"The specific results found for the San Francisco Bay Area are likely to apply to any major urban centre, though with varying importance," writes Parsons. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/the-we...-areas-at-the-same-time-sea-levels-are-rising

 

[Cloudbusting]

Better hope we all start evolving gills.

But seriously that is quite mortifying.

 

[ramonmercado]

More on Mexico City getting that sinking feeling.

WHEN DARÍO SOLANO‐ROJAS moved from his hometown of Cuernavaca to Mexico City to study at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the layout of the metropolis confused him. Not the grid itself, mind you, but the way that the built environment seemed to be in tumult, like a surrealist painting. “What surprised me was that everything was kind of twisted and tilted,” says Solano‐Rojas. “At that time, I didn't know what it was about. I just thought, ‘Oh, well, the city is so much different than my hometown.’”

Different, it turned out, in a bad way. Picking up the study of geology at the university, Solano‐Rojas met geophysicist Enrique Cabral-Cano, who was actually researching the surprising reason for that infrastructural chaos: The city was sinking—big time. It’s the result of a geological phenomenon called subsidence, which usually happens when too much water is drawn from underground, and the land above begins to compact. According to new modeling by the two researchers and their colleagues, parts of the city are sinking as much as 20 inches a year. In the next century and a half, they calculate, areas could drop by as much as 65 feet. Spots just outside Mexico City proper could sink 100 feet. That twisting and tilting Solano‐Rojas noticed was just the start of a slow-motion crisis for 9.2 million people in the fastest-sinking city on Earth. ...

https://www.wired.com/story/mexico-city-could-sink-up-to-65-feet/

 

[blessmycottonsocks]

Quite an amusing illustration of how data may be manipulated:
Notice something?

Spoiler

The data points are identical in each graph.