The DOI matches its Crossref record; 15 of the 15 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Scale and diversity of the physical technosphere: A geological perspective
Open accessAbstract
We assess the scale and extent of the physical technosphere, defined here as the summed material output of the contemporary human enterprise. It includes active urban, agricultural and marine components, used to sustain energy and material flow for current human life, and a growing residue layer, currently only in small part recycled back into the active component. Preliminary estimates suggest a technosphere mass of approximately 30 trillion tonnes (Tt), which helps support a human biomass that, despite recent growth, is ~5 orders of magnitude smaller. The physical technosphere includes a large, rapidly growing diversity of complex objects that are potential trace fossils or ‘technofossils’. If assessed on palaeontological criteria, technofossil diversity already exceeds known estimates of biological diversity as measured by richness, far exceeds recognized fossil diversity, and may exceed total biological diversity through Earth’s history. The rapid transformation of much of Earth’s surface mass into the technosphere and its myriad components underscores the novelty of the current planetary transformation.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Pauly, D., Christensen, V., Dalsgaard, J., Froese, R., & Torres, F. (1998) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.279.5352.860 · Cited by 4,743
The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration
Steffen, W., Broadgate, W., Deutsch, L., Gaffney, O., & Ludwig, C. (2015) · The Anthropocene Review · doi:10.1177/2053019614564785 · Cited by 3,935
Self-citationHow Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean?
Mora, C., Tittensor, D. P., Adl, S., Simpson, A. G. B., & Worm, B. (2011) · PLoS Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001127 · Cited by 3,045 · cited 1×
“…number of eukaryotic organisms so described as species is 2 million, though estimates of the total number, including undescribed species, has ranged from ~3 to ~100 million, with recent estimates at between 5 and 15 million (Mora et al., 2011, for instance, suggest ~9 million eukaryotic species).”
BackgroundThe Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene
Waters, C. N., Zalasiewicz, J., Summerhayes, C., Barnosky, A. D., Poirier, C., Gałuszka, A., Cearreta, A., Edgeworth, M., Ellis, E. C., Ellis, M., et al. (2016) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.aad2622 · Cited by 2,375 · cited 3×
“Our estimates may help inform both considerations of formal stratigraphy (Waters et al., 2016) and wider discussions on the Anthropocene and its underlying social and technological processes, including those relating to material culture in archaeology (Hodder, 2011).”
BackgroundResultSelf-citationAn ecosystem engineer, the beaver, increases species richness at the landscape scale
Wright, J. P., Jones, C. G., & Flecker, A. S. (2002) · Oecologia · doi:10.1007/s00442-002-0929-1 · Cited by 674
Megafauna biomass tradeoff as a driver of Quaternary and future extinctions
Barnosky, A. D. (2008) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.0801918105 · Cited by 280
Self-citationThe technofossil record of humans
Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Waters, C. N., Barnosky, A. D., & Haff, P. (2014) · The Anthropocene Review · doi:10.1177/2053019613514953 · Cited by 272
Self-citationWilliams, M., Zalasiewicz, J., Haff, P., Schwägerl, C., Barnosky, A. D., & Ellis, E. C. (2015) · The Anthropocene Review · doi:10.1177/2053019615591020 · Cited by 226
Self-citationCan nuclear weapons fallout mark the beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch?
Waters, C. N., Syvitski, J. P. M., Gałuszka, A., Hancock, G. J., Zalasiewicz, J., Cearreta, A., Grinevald, J., Jeandel, C., McNeill, J. R., Summerhayes, C., et al. (2015) · Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists · doi:10.1177/0096340215581357 · Cited by 213
Self-citationRose, N. L. (2015) · Environmental Science & Technology · doi:10.1021/acs.est.5b00543 · Cited by 178
Cited by
The Concept of the Anthropocene
Malhi, Y. (2017) · Annual Review of Environment and Resources · doi:10.1146/annurev-environ-102016-060854 · Cited by 283
(2019) · Cambridge University Press eBooks · Cited by 125
The chronostratigraphic method is unsuitable for determining the start of the Anthropocene
Edgeworth, M., Ellis, E. C., Gibbard, P., Neal, C., & Ellis, M. (2019) · Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment · doi:10.1177/0309133319831673 · Cited by 71
Self-citationMore than Just a Record: Active Ecological Effects of Archaeological Strata
Edgeworth, M. (2018) · Historical Archaeology and Environment · doi:10.1007/978-3-319-90857-1_2 · Cited by 25
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Waters, C. N., Barnosky, A. D., Palmesino, J., Rönnskog, A.-S., Edgeworth, M., Neal, C., Cearreta, A., Ellis, E. C., Grinevald, J., Haff, P., Ivar do Sul, J. A., Jeandel, C., Leinfelder, R., McNeill, J. R., Odada, E., Oreskes, N., Price, S. J., Revkin, A., Steffen, W., Summerhayes, C., Vidas, D., Wing, S., & Wolfe, A. P.
- Venue
- The Anthropocene Review
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2016-11-28
- Volume
- 4
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 9-22
- ISSN
- 2053-0196 (ISSN-L)
- 2053-020X
- OpenAlex
- W2557451516
- Cited by
- 338
- References
- 15
- FWCI
- 25.16
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Scale and diversity of the physical technosphere: A geological perspective. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/2053019616677743
- The paper
- Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Waters, C. N., Barnosky, A. D., Palmesino, J., Rönnskog, A.-S., Edgeworth, M., Neal, C., Cearreta, A., Ellis, E. C., Grinevald, J., Haff, P., Ivar do Sul, J. A., Jeandel, C., Leinfelder, R., McNeill, J. R., Odada, E., Oreskes, N., Price, S. J., . . . Wolfe, A. P. (2017). Scale and diversity of the physical technosphere: A geological perspective. The Anthropocene Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019616677743
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
