I recently watched a video that mentioned the “toxic pit problem” of how closed mines turn into toxic lakes full of rainwater and harmful chemicals. Some companies are trying to fix them, but I was wondering if the Earth could “purify” itself if left completely alone?
Like, let’s say all of humanity disappeared tomorrow, could the harmful chemicals be filtered out or dissolved or changed after a billion years?
In: Planetary Science
Harmful is in relation to humans and maybe most animals, not nature. The earth doesn’t really care about what we do, the biosphere will most likely recover anything we can throw at it and we would annihilate ourselves faster than kill the biosphere.
There have been multiple catastrophic events and the mass extinctions to go with it. Given enough time evolution will find ways to live almost anywhere. Some bacteria live off of radiation or snails near steam geysers hotter than the surface of the sun.
Oxygen was once responsible for a mass extinction and then evolution created beings that depended on it to work.
Pollution isn’t killing the earth it’s killing us and the things we depend on.
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