Robert Macfarlane, author of recent book Landmarks, remarks in NewScientist (19 December 2015) on the castoffs of the Anthropocene’s dominant species:
The [potash] mining is done by £3.2 million machines, which – at least to my zoomorphic eye – resemble Komodo dragons, low-slung and sharp-toothed. These machines are taken down the main shaft in six or seven sections, then assembled in bays a kilometre below the surface. Once complete, they take three days to trundle out to the production district, where they begin work.
Years later, when a machine has been exhausted by the demands of its labour, it’s just too expensive to bring it back to the surface, for this would mean suspending the transport of the profitable potash itself. So instead it is driven into a worked-out tunnel of rock salt, and abandoned.
Slowly, the pressure of depth squeezes the tunnel, and translucent salt flows around the machine, encasing it. Thus we lay down a future fossil of the Anthropocene: a machine-relic in a halite cocoon.
Great visual.
