Joe Exclamation
It’s easy to think of the Earth as a closed system where nothing enters and nothing leaves. But you’d be wrong. Apart from all the heat and helium that our blue planet pours out into the galaxy every day, we are consuming its resources at an alarming rate. And here are 6 things that we are running out of!
1. Sand
The Earth is not haemorrhaging this substance out into space, sure. But it takes thousands of years of erosion to create it and we are using it up faster than the Earth can make it, in the construction of cities and screens and microchips. Your phone is made partly out of sand. As are your windows and your house. But there’s loads of sand on the beaches and deserts? Why don’t we just build with that? We don’t tend to use beach sand for construction because it’s full of minerals and is fine and rounded and we are using up quarry sand at an unsustainable rate.
2. Helium
No, helium is not a gas that we make in bottles for blowing up balloons at parties. It is a natural resource that we extract from the depths of the Earth and could well run out in 30 to 50 years time. When the gas eventually leaks out of your party balloons, it keeps rises up until it leaves the planet and floats off into the galaxy for all eternity. This is a problem as we use it for cooling the magnets in medical MRI scanners and other machinery.
3. Orbital Space
There are 500,000 floating objects orbiting Earth and we only use 2,000 of them. Aside from those 2,000 usable satellites, the rest is space trash; leftover pieces of rocket-boosters, broken satellites and previous collision pieces. Every time a new satellite or probe is launched, more trash is added into our orbit, and less orbital space we have left.
4. Bananas
In the 1950’s bananas came very close to extinction, as a fungus known as Panama Disease destroyed almost all the crops worldwide. Producers quickly changed from the Gros Michel variety and began growing Cavendish bananas which weren’t affected. However, the disease now affects Cavendish banana trees which is a big problem, as 95% of the world’s banana trees are genetically identical.
5. Topsoil
The top most layer of soil contains all the necessary nutrients for plants to grow, but according to the WWF, we’ve already lost half of the world’s topsoil in just the last 150 years. And it takes 500 years to produce an inch of this naturally, so in less than 150 years we will run out of topsoil.
6. Phosphorus
Phosphorus doesn’t sound like something that’s part of our everyday lives, or that we’d miss it that much. But it’s actually essential for the creation of DNA and all plant life on Earth. Phosphate Rock is formed in the Earth’s crust over millions of years, and we grind it into powder for use in fertilisers to grow plants. It then ends up getting washed into the sea and finally ends up, useless, on the sea bed. Studies estimate that the remaining sources of phosphorus will only last 35 to 40 years more.
So that’s scary then.
Has any of things running out alarmed you?
Let us know in the comments!