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
Oh it’s only toxic to life *as we currently know it*.
But life likes to adapt. It’s what it does.
Read up about the **Great Oxidation Event**.
The TL;DR is that oxygen used to be rare as it’s *highly reactive* and *incredibly toxic* to myriad species at the time. But it caused an explosion of growth and new organisms and here we are now, requiring that (formerly) toxic element to *survive*. Not that those prior organisms would even *recognize* the Earth the way it currently is — since it killed them.
Geologic time is measured in millions of years. So the plenty will be fine.
It probably will just find a new equilibrium, allowing evolution to do it’s job, and life will go on.
Specifically regarding the “after a billion years” part, the sun will be putting out about 10% more energy in a billion years. The oceans will boil away and the atmosphere will experience runaway greenhouse warming, that will turn Earth into a more hellish version of Venus. It rains sulfuric acid on Venus, and it’ll do the same thing here in a billion years, so any chemicals we leave behind will probably be indistinguishable from the normal nightmareish chemical wasteland by that time.
That’s not an argument against environmental concerns, it’s just that a billion years has its own way of solving problems.
Of course it can. We humans are just a spik in the life of this earth. It was here way before us and will be here when we are long gone.
“Purify” really has no meaning.
Humanity is and will always be just a blip in the history of the earth.
“Purity” is a concept we humans have, of the kind of Earth that best supports our species, or what we want to claim as what we think the Earth needs to be.
But prior to and post humanity and the kinds of multi-cellular organisms we consider as “life”, the Earth has been in worse shape and will be in worse shape.
The Earth has been at one point all lava and magma and sulfur rain, possibly a turbulent ocean world, and just before time as we know it, a world of incredible cold then a world of incredible warmth. And eventually there will be an Earth that is just rock. Clearly all worse conditions than what we have now.
And if you really think about it, all humans ever really did was utilize the resources the Earth provided, but also realize the fact that it is the Earth that made humans by allowing cellular organisms to exist.
Humanity, and the way we deal with our environment is just a quick effect of Earth being Earth along its extremely long lifetime.
There’s no “pure Earth”, that’s just for us humans to think about and experience in our lifetimes.
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