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acid andy [soylentnews.org] writes:

Human Made Materials Now Outweigh Earth's Entire Biomass [europeanscientist.com]

While the natural world continues to shrink, the ‘anthropogenic mass’ – the mass of all human-made materials created since the Industrial revolution, including houses, cars, roads, and aeroplanes – has grown. Indeed, the number of so-called technospecies has far surpassed the estimated 9 million biological species on the planet, according to a new groundbreaking study [nature.com] published on 10 December in the journal Nature.

[...]The new findings support recent calls to recognise a new epoch called the Anthropocene [europeanscientist.com] to account for the profound impacts of human activity on the Earth.

[...]At the beginning of the 20th century, the mass of human-produced objects was equal to about 3 per cent of the world’s total biomass but in 2020, has reached about 1.1 teratonnes, exceeding overall global biomass. Moreover, this dramatic increase in human constructions has been accompanied by significant losses in biomass. Humanity has roughly halved the mass of plants since the first agricultural revolution, the authors say.

Where do we go from here?

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