About the event

A blizzard of new objects has suddenly appeared on Earth: plastic bottles, ballpoint pens, enlarged chicken bones, and teabags, to name but a few. They're produced for our comfort and pleasure, then quickly discarded. This treasure chest underpins our lives, but it is also giving way to a completely new style of fossilisation – technofossils. The book, Discarded, explores how these new fossils will transform as they are attacked by bacteria, baked by the Earth's inner heat, squashed by overlying rock, permeated by subterranean fluids, and crumpled by mountain-building movements — as well as what will be left of them and their impact on our current ecological systems.

About the speakers

Sarah Gabbott is a Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester. She researches the fossil record of ancient life and is particularly interested in understanding how fossils form and what they reveal about evolution and ecology. She actively seeks new fossil specimens from across the globe, going on digs in China, South Africa and the Canadian Rockies. She also works in the laboratory analysing fossils and undertaking grisly experiments to determine how decomposition affects fossilisation. Recently, she has turned her attention to the potential fossil record created by human activity, particularly how long our 'artefacts' will endure.

Jan Zalasiewicz is Emeritus Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester. He was formerly a field geologist and palaeontologist with the British Geological Survey, involved in the geological mapping of eastern England and central Wales. His interests include Early Palaeozoic fossils, notably the graptolites (a kind of extinct zooplankton), mud and mudrocks, the Quaternary Ice Ages, the nature of geological time, and the geology made by humans. In recent years he has helped develop the concept of an Anthropocene epoch.

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