FOOTPRINTS

IN SEARCH OF FUTURE FOSSILS

David Farrier

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © David Farrier 2020

Cover image by heartlessmachine.com

Cover photograph by Ethan Humphries

David Farrier asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008286347

Ebook Edition © March 2020 ISBN: 9780008286354

Version: 2020-01-20

Dedication

For Isaac and Annie

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

TRACES OF A HAUNTED FUTURE

ONE

THE INSATIABLE ROAD

TWO

THIN CITIES

THREE

THE BOTTLE AS HERO

FOUR

THE LIBRARY OF BABEL

FIVE

MEDUSA’S GAZE

SIX

THE MOMENT UNDER THE MOMENT

SEVEN

WHERE THERE SHOULD BE SOMETHING, THERE IS NOTHING

EIGHT

THE LITTLE GOD

CODA

SEEING THE NEW WORLD

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION
TRACES OF A HAUNTED FUTURE

England’s eastern edge is slowly being reclaimed by the sea. At a rate of around two metres per year, the tides carry away the shallow cliffs that form the East Anglian coastline. Seasonal storms gouge away the earth, mostly glacial till that was deposited when ice sheets reached as far as southern Britain 450,000 years ago; like a cheaply made wall, the coast is vulnerable to erosion and sudden collapses. One night in 1845, a farmer ploughed a twelve-acre field near Happisburgh, in Norfolk, and retired to bed with the soil ready for planting the following morning. When he woke, the field had vanished. Coastal defences built after devastating floods in 1953, which killed over three hundred people, have long since crumbled. Buildings that once stood out of sight of the coast now huddle within its reach, and homeowners watch anxiously as the margin creeps closer, eating up their lovingly tended gardens inch by inch. Occasionally, a house tumbles into the sea. The ground beneath your feet feels provisional, as though you are standing on borrowed time.

Sometimes, though, the sea gives something back. In May 2013, a spring storm uncovered the oldest traces of human passage outside Africa on Happisburgh’s claggy foreshore. Heaving seas had stripped away the sand behind the dilapidated postwar flood defences to reveal a section of laminated silt flecked with dozens of lozenge-shaped hollows. The scooped depressions were the 850,000-year-old fossil footprints left by a group of early humans, Homo antecessor, moving along the muddy banks of an ancient river. The differently sized footprints suggested that it was a group of mixed age, adults and children, headed in a southerly direction. At the time, it was an estuarine landscape, populated by pine, spruce, and birch forests interspersed with open areas of heath and grassland. Photographs of the footprints resemble a step map of a frantic dance floor. The busy play of feet suggests a neighbourly scene: adults pausing to coax tired children or turning to check the horizon for predators; arms raised to indicate points of interest or offer an encouraging hand on the shoulder. Some impressions were so well preserved that you could see the outlines of individual toes.

Briefly, startlingly, this small party of hominids walked out of the deep past and into the present. They disappeared almost as fast: within two weeks, the tide had washed away every print.

Ancient footprints, like burrows, tracks and tooth marks, are known as trace fossils. Unlike fossilized remains, they speak of life rather than death. Though bodiless, they bear witness to a departed body’s weight, gait, and habits, telling stories about how ancient lives were lived. Trace fossils like the Happisburgh footprints are an accidental memory; where the group came from and where they were heading are beyond our knowing. But the prints offer an enchanting glimpse of ancestors whose past seems to brush against our present, whose step into our time seems like an invitation to join in a mysterious journey. Even in photographs they conjure the uncanny sensation that the group has only just left, their prints fresh and glistening – that we could catch them, if only we hurried.

In terms of traces left by early humans, the Happisburgh footprints are relatively young. The oldest known hominid prints were made 3.6 million years ago, in volcanic ash at Laetoli in what is now the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, in Tanzania. They were discovered in 1976 and embraced as marks of a Pliocene ‘first family’, making their way like Milton’s Adam and Eve, ‘hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow’. When the deep past arrives in the present, it is often surprising. The Laetoli footprints were found when, in high spirits during a break in their labours, a team of palaeoanthropologists led by Mary Leakey began to throw elephant dung at one another. One exuberant member of the party noticed the prints only after falling on them.

But perhaps the most famous footprint, at least the one pressed most deeply in the Western imagination, was never really made at all:

It happen’d one Day about Noon going towards my Boat, I was exceedingly surpriz’d with the Print of a Man’s naked Foot on the Shore, which was very plain to be seen in the Sand: I stood like one Thunder-struck, or as if I had seen an Apparition; I listen’d, I looked round me; I could hear nothing, nor see any thing … there was exactly the very Print of a Foot, Toes, Heel, and every Part of a Foot; how it came thither, I knew not, nor could in the least imagine.

This discovery of a single footprint is the most iconic moment in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719 and sometimes referred to as the first modern novel. Robert Louis Stevenson considered it one of four emblematic scenes in literature that, more than any other, have been ‘printed on the mind’s eye forever’. Friday’s impossible mark – how can there be only one, isolated in the middle of an otherwise pristine beach? – has Crusoe spooked. After enduring the solitude of his deserted island, he suddenly sees hints of human presence everywhere, ‘mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man’.

The discoveries of Friday’s footprint and the footprints of early humans have such a vivid claim on our imagination because we have all lived a version of it at some point: the sudden feeling of being accompanied by an unseen other. Although you are alone, the air seems somehow closer, or an empty room is still thick with the presence of one only just departed. Someone or something has passed through already.

In the final part of The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot drew inspiration from accounts of the Shackleton expeditions to Antarctica, in which exhausted members of the party would hallucinate that there was always one more person present than could be counted. ‘When I look ahead up the white road,’ complains one of the poem’s many disembodied voices, ‘there is always another one walking beside you.’ It was recently suggested that the Laetoli footprints do not represent a pair walking side by side, as was originally thought, but sets of individual prints made at different times. New high-resolution photographic techniques have revealed a third set of toeprints obscured by the other two. The third walker seems to have favoured their left foot over their right and was perhaps carrying an injury. Wherever they were going, they did not come back by the same route: there are no footprints to mark the return journey.

AS ONE SET OF FOOTPRINTS stepped out of the past, another kind stepped into the future. In May 2013, the same month that the Happisburgh footprints were uncovered, climate scientists at the Mauna Loa Observatory, in Hawaii, announced that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels had reached 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in all human history.

For the past eight hundred millennia, since the Happisburgh footprints were pressed in the mud to the middle of the nineteenth century, atmospheric CO₂ has oscillated between 180 and 280 ppm as the planet moved between freezing ice ages and warm interglacial periods. The last time concentrations were higher than 280 ppm was during the mid-Pliocene, three and a half million years ago, when the Laetoli footprints were made and our earliest ancestors were only just beginning to diverge from apes. It was in many ways a world we would recognize: the continents were essentially in the same pos-itions they occupy now, inhabited for the most part by similar species of plants and animals, while the same kinds of fish swam in the oceans between them. But the seas themselves were tens of metres above where they are today, and the global mean temperature was around 3 degrees Celsius higher.

If the Pliocene world resembles the one we know, it also, potentially, foreshadows what our world will become. Some scientists look to the mid-Pliocene as a form of ‘palaeo-laboratory’ to better understand the difficult and dangerous world we will live in if the planet continues to heat up. Global mean temperatures are already 1 degree Celsius higher than they were in 1850, and we could reach 1.5 degrees Celsius by the middle of this century, leaving us poised on the threshold of a world that is radically different from the one modern humans evolved in. Already, drought and flood, wildfires and storms, have become more common in many parts of the world, with fatal consequences, but beyond an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius, we face the prospect of having to rapidly learn how to live on a planet that has become profoundly alien: where crops do not grow as they once did, equatorial cities have become uninhabitable, and low-lying islands and nations sink beneath the sea. Perhaps a fifth of the ecosystems on Earth will undergo some kind of fundamental change if we cross this threshold, but far more worryingly, it would trigger the irreversible thawing of Arctic permafrost, releasing catastrophic levels of greenhouse gases and guaranteeing a return to a Pliocene-like climate within several centuries.

The new Pliocene is not a given, yet. We can still determine a different future. Even so, signs of the changes we have already wrought abound and will be evident to those who inhabit that future, however distant. Much of the carbon dioxide that rose from the furnaces of the industrial revolution and the exhausts of the very first combustion engines still circulates unseen above our heads, while the distinctive isotopes that come from burning fossil fuels are scattered like spores over the entire planet, layered in glaciers and lake sediments. Even if we were to stop using fossil fuels immediately, traces of the carbon we have produced would still linger for time out of mind. David Archer, a climate scientist at the University of Chicago, has estimated that as much as a third of the carbon derived from burning fossil fuels will remain in the atmosphere a thousand years from now. After ten thousand years, this declines to between 10 and 15 per cent, but the last of a long tail of around 7 per cent of anthropogenic carbon won’t be weathered away for one hundred thousand years, long enough to delay future ice ages. Our carbon could influence the climate for the next half a million years.

The entire atmosphere now bears the marks of our passage, like a vast geochemical trace fossil of the journeys we have taken and the energy we have consumed. When the last residue of our carbon finally leaves the atmosphere, humanity will have lived and evolved through another four thousand generations. Language and communication will have altered beyond our ken; how people in the year 102,000 ce talk and think, what they consider to be art or music, may well be unrecognizable to us. What it means to be human may even have changed in ways we cannot imagine, but as that change unfolds and our descendants pull away from us, like the ghostly third figure in Eliot’s poem, we will accompany them.

To produce the spike in atmospheric carbon measured by the Mauna Loa scientists, we have also made countless other deep marks, from the burrows we have dug in pursuit of fuel or minerals to the network of hard-wearing roads that carry them from pit to pump or factory. Our carbon traces won’t be directly legible without specialist knowledge and equipment, but we can already read them in the form of more frequent and intense extreme-weather events. New landscapes shaped by climate change will silently bear witness. Droughts that parch the land or storms that flood it may produce trace fossils of their own, as ecosystems change or collapse altogether and rising seas make living in coastal cities untenable. A huge proportion of anthropogenic carbon isn’t in the atmosphere at all but has been absorbed by the oceans, which are becoming progressively warmer and more acidic, with severe consequences for virtually everything that lives in or depends on them.

The moment I realized the uncanny coincidence of the discoveries in Happisburgh and Hawaii was both thrilling and appalling. In part, it was the curious intimacy of a connection across such a broad stretch of time. Like Crusoe, the Happisburgh prints give us ‘Toes, Heel, and every Part of a Foot’ – individual bodies that walked, and feared, and loved just as we do. But I wondered whether the ‘footprint’ we have left in the atmosphere will also inspire the same sense of recognition. Will future generations feel the past rush toward them, just as 850,000 years contracted to a distance of a few metres when the Happisburgh prints were discovered? Will they, like Crusoe, be alarmed by the realization that our presence still haunts their passage? The footprint has become one of the most widely recognized metaphors for human impact on the planet. Particularly in the West, we are urged to be mindful of how the way we live produces a deeper or shallower chemical imprint on the world’s atmosphere. Our carbon footprint is a mark of how much we care (or don’t) about the consequences of our actions. Sometimes the metaphor is literal, such as the famous exhortation that hikers ‘take only photographs, leave only footprints’. But the suggestion that a footprint is ephemeral, a temporary impression soon wiped clear by wind or rain, masks the reality that our marks will endure for a very long time indeed. Our trace fossils will be inscribed in the planet’s geological, chemical and evolutionary history, legible, in some cases, even to our most distant successors. Long after we are silent, they will speak of how life was lived in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

We can only speculate about who might notice them many years from now, if at all. Perhaps no one will be around to read our traces, but nonetheless we are, everywhere, constantly, and with the most astonishing profligacy, leaving a legacy that will endure for hundreds of thousands or even hundreds of millions of years to come. Like the Happisburgh prints, what seems most fleeting presages the most incredible leap in time. We are conjuring ourselves as ghosts who will haunt the very deep future.

I TEACH ENGLISH LITERATURE at the University of Edinburgh. In early 2013, only a few months before the Mauna Loa announcement and the discovery at Happisburgh, I began teaching a course concerned with writing about nature and place. Since then, once a week in the spring semester, my students and I gather in a small room around tables of lacquered blond wood, a surface that feels more like plastic than pine, and talk about the work of writers like Edward Thomas, Kathleen Jamie, and W. G. Sebald. One side of the room is all windows that open out onto a view of Salisbury Crags, a wave of fine-grained dolerite cliffs breaking at the foot of Arthur’s Seat, the extinct volcano around which Edinburgh has wrapped itself for more than a thousand years.

My fascination with the idea of deep time began with teaching this course in the shadow of Salisbury Crags. Like the hub of an enormous wheel, the crags are both an emblem and a point of orientation for the city of Edinburgh. The path that runs around the base of the cliffs offers spectacular views of the rampart of the Pentland Hills to the south, and to the north and west, the Georgian New Town, the Forth estuary, and beyond to the low hills of Fife. But the crags hold an even more special place in the history of time. In the eighteenth century, while Edinburgh was the hub of an extraordinary clamour of intellectual activity known as the Scottish Enlightenment, the area was a quarry. A gentleman farmer named James Hutton used the crags to demonstrate his theory that sedimentary rocks are gradually lifted into mountains by immense heat and pressure from below the ground. His discovery of a fist of reddish igneous rock closed around a paler chip of much older dolerite, now known as Hutton’s Section, proved that molten rock intruded upon older sedimentary layers. Hutton’s Theory of the Earth, published in 1788, was the first scientific work to imagine the immensely long timescales required to shape the planet.

Hutton’s ideas set him at odds with geologists today: whereas he saw the world as a machine, endlessly running through cycles of sedimentation that lifted the earth and erosion that ground it down, modern geologists acknowledge that the planet is shaped by sudden events as well as predictable processes, that cataclysms – a sudden increase in volcanic activity, or a meteor strike – have as much influence as the orderly cycles Hutton identified. Rather, his legacy is the scope he gave others to think with. His real innovation was to fundamentally change how we look at the world around us. Such a vision, measured in grains of sand, required hundreds of millions of years, deep time beyond anything that had been envisaged before.

Hutton’s section was one of the first places where deep time was imagined, but the phrase is not his. Curiously, it first appears in a reflection on how long good writing might last. ‘All work is as seed sown’, wrote the Scottish polymath Thomas Carlyle in 1832, in an essay on James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson that speculated on the longevity of Johnson’s writing. ‘It grows and spreads and sows itself, and so, in endless palingenesis’ – or rebirth – ‘lives and works. Who shall compute what effects have been produced, and are still, and into deep Time, producing?’ Just under 150 years later it was popularized by the American essayist John McPhee in Basin and Range, a book about the landscape of the southwestern United States. But like the fingers of magma that fired his imagination, Hutton’s vision of deep time intruded upon the minds of the poets and writers who followed him. We can read traces of Hutton’s thinking in Tennyson’s In Memoriam (‘The hills are shadows, and they flow / From form to form’). In ‘On the Sea’, Keats fancies that the ocean ‘gluts twice ten thousand Caverns’, and in Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’, the slow violence of glaciation becomes ‘a flood of ruin’, producing landscapes ‘ghastly, and scarr’d, and riven’. For some, deep time replenished a sense of mystery depleted by the loosening bonds of religious faith. ‘How little do we know of the business of the earth’, wrote Edward Thomas, ‘not to speak of the universe; of time, not to speak of eternity’. Without Hutton’s insight into the great age of the planet, Charles Darwin would not have had the scope to conceive his theory of evolution. From the perspective of very deep time, the most intractable rocks appear as fragile as eggshells, as free flowing as water.

Treating the planet as a succession of sinks and taps, as we have, has kept us focused on the present, concealing the fact that we also inhabit this flow. Earth’s long pulse shapes the arc of our lives, but to see this poses a tremendous challenge to our everyday imaginations. For the most part, deep time is ‘the strange sleep’, which, according to Shelley, ‘wraps all in its own deep eternity’.

One day in November 1944, standing on a ‘bare ocean-moulded hill’ in the chalk uplands of Dorset, the Irish writer John Stewart Collis sought to peer through the veil. ‘I pressed my mind back through the bottomless abysses of time’, he wrote later. The effort is beyond him, but it summons a memory of when time did, briefly, stand revealed:

Once, in the middle of the Atlantic, looking at the horizon, I tried to imagine the space beyond it. For a second I had a true glimpse of that space, and of the space beyond that space. And perhaps for as much as a second now, I saw the reality of a hundred million years.

In the ocean’s immensity, the truly deep age of the earth flares for an instant with the force of a vision. In the rhetoric of ancient Greece, the term for this irruption of clarity was enargeia, and it described a speaker’s capacity to peer beyond the present moment: Aristotle wrote that enargeia allowed an audience to ‘see things occurring now, not hear of it as in the future’. What Collis saw as he sought to push his mind’s eye beyond the grey horizon was the enargeia of deep time, rhyming the pitch and roll of the Atlantic with an uncanny tilt of the senses. The same vision is available to us, too, if we choose to look with patience and care, and by it we can catch, as Shelley did, ‘gleams of a remoter world’.

Or perhaps not so remote. What enargeia reveals is not always easy to face – the poet Alice Oswald’s translation of the term is ‘bright unbearable reality’. Not long after the peak in May 2013, global atmospheric CO₂ dropped below 400 ppm, but this was only a brief reprieve. Allowing for fluctuations, today the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere is around 410 ppm, rising at around 2 ppm per year. Climate scientists at the Australian National University recently proposed that human activity is forcing changes to the Earth system 170 times faster than natural processes. By this queasy calculus, we will see ten thousand years of environmental change in fifty-eight years, less than a single lifetime.

Some geologists think that this staggering rate of change justifies the naming of a new phase in planetary history. For more than one hundred years the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, which lays down the sequence of geologic time, has culminated with the Holocene, the period of benign climate that began around 11,700 years ago with the end of the last ice age and coincided with the development of human society. But in 2009, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) charged a group of geologists, biologists, atmospheric chemists, polar and marine scientists, archaeologists and Earth scientists with establishing whether or not the chart should be updated to reflect the onset of a new unit of geological time: the Anthropocene, or the time of the human. The Anthropocene Working Group has focused its efforts on a search for evidence of wholesale change in the way the earth works as a system of interdependent geochemical, sedimentary and biological processes. For the evidence to be compelling, they determined, it must produce new and distinct layers in the stratigraphic record. The group explored human-mediated acceleration in the rates of erosion and sedimentation, disturbances to the major chemical cycles (carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus), the likelihood of significant changes in sea level, and the effect of human activity on the diversity and distribution of species across the globe. They examined the potential for synthetic materials, from artificial radionuclides produced by nuclear testing to plastic waste, to leave an identifiable signal in the strata. Many of these changes and signals, they concluded, are not only present and observable now but also effectively a permanent part of the archaeological and stratigraphic record.

When determining the boundaries of geologic time, stratigraphers search for sites where evidence of the shift from one geological age to another glitters in the dark of deep time. Such boundary sites are sometimes referred to as ‘golden spikes’, and marked by a bronze plaque hammered into the rock. But what the Anthropocene Working Group sought was the flash of enargeia: not the residues of worlds past, but the difficult brightness of a new world arriving. Geology is a cautious discipline: many who practise it feel that the process for introducing a new entry in the International Chronostratigraphic Chart ought to be as patient as forming a novel layer in the strata. But in 2016, at the International Geological Congress in Cape Town, the members of the ICS voted nearly unanimously that the Anthropocene was a stratigraphic reality and that it coincided with the eruption of technological innovation and material consumption in the middle of the twentieth century. The AWG is currently working on a proposal to formalize the Anthropocene as a new unit in geologic time.

Hutton learned to read the deep past in the rocks he saw every day, and according to the Anthropocene Working Group we can now read something of the deep future in even the most ordinary artefacts. The evidence of the Anthropocene is all around us, inextricably woven into the way we live our lives. But to see it, we need to face the ‘bright unbearable reality’ of the world we have made.

IN MY CLASS, as the crags loom darkly outside our window, we busy ourselves with words on the page. For ten weeks, my students and I share ideas about what others have said about the natural world. We tour vicariously through Scottish moors and English woods, following in the footsteps, if only figuratively, of writers who have traced a river from source to sea or pursued a bird of prey across winter fields. Field trips aren’t usually undertaken by literature students, but as if to acknowledge that ours is only a second-hand study of nature, at the end of the course we finally step outside the classroom. One Saturday morning in March we board a train to Dunbar, fifty kilometres east of Edinburgh, on the Lothian coast.

Our route from the train station to Barns Ness Lighthouse is only around twelve kilometres there and back, along a low, rocky shore. The walk begins by skirting the edge of the well-disciplined greens of the town golf course, following a thin ribbon of turf marked out for the benefit of walkers. The manicured lawns contrast strikingly with the disorderly flotsam piled up where the green gives way abruptly to pebbled beach. But as the last hole tapers away in a tangle of unruly grass, a much more complex scene starts to take shape.

It is, in truth, a rather functional landscape, pinned to a narrow strip of coastline by the grey barrier of the A1, the faint susurrus of distant traffic mingling with the sighing waves. At the far end of the beach that curls away from the golf course, a modern cement works, fed by a huge open-cut pit, overlooks a clutch of derelict nineteenth-century kilns, relics of the time when layers of coal and limestone were stripped and burned to provide quicklime for local farmers. The kilns, too dangerous to enter, are encircled by a chain-link fence and wreathed with warning signs. The whole scene sits on top of a limestone pavement, source of the materials cooked up in the kilns 150 years ago. Most of the fossils here are, like the Happisburgh footprints, trace fossils. Thousands of curved tubes, the tiny marks of long-extinct animals burrowing for shelter or food, are strewn across the pavement like pieces of macaroni. A large area is pockmarked with dozens of shallow basins, thought to mark the sites of individual trees that grew in a tropical Carboniferous forest when Scotland lay nearly at the equator. Some basins are filled with seatearth, a fossilized wetland soil in which you can still see the fine tracery of ancient roots.

As the naturalist Adam Nicolson has said, in geological terms northern Europe is a landscape in recovery, still reeling from the immense trauma of glaciation. Since the ice sheets melted away, the British Isles have been rising slowly through a process called isostatic uplift – rebounding into shape like a pillow relieved of the weight of a sleeper’s head. Just as the mountains in the Highlands of Scotland, which once rose higher than the Himalayas, have been ground down to nubs, the town, the motorway, the lime kilns, and the cement works will weather away over time until virtually no trace remains. But before that erasure they will have marked the earth indelibly. The cement works are a reminder of the truly sublime quantities of concrete that we have produced, and the processes involved. Humans have been earth movers for thousands of years. It’s thought that if all the evidence of human geomorphology to date were heaped together, the spoil would form a mountain range four thousand metres high, forty kilometres wide, and one hundred kilometres long. But by the end of the twenty-first century we will have shifted as much stone and sediment in 150 years, through mining, construction, and road building, as humans moved in the preceding five millennia. Every year we move around eighteen thousand times more rock than the Krakatoa eruption in 1883. Around half a trillion metric tonnes of concrete have so far been cast for human use, enough to spread a kilogram layer across every square metre of the earth’s surface, half of it produced in the last twenty years.

A few miles to the south of the limestone pavement lies Torness Nuclear Power Station. In time to come, there will be nothing left of the installation itself except perhaps an irradiated patch of ground. But the waste it has produced, even in the thirty or so years since it opened, will leave a trail across the globe. Much of the uranium processed at Torness comes from Australia, from underground mines like Olympic Dam in South Australia or open-cast mines like Ranger in the Northern Territory – a vast crater, stepped like an Incan city, which has displaced tens of millions of tonnes of rock. At present, spent fuel from Torness is delivered to Sellafield in Cumbria, the largest nuclear facility in the UK, along with 80 per cent of all the country’s high-level waste. Thousands of cubic metres of waste, accumulated in the first four decades since the plant opened in the 1950s, are still stored in huge open-air concrete storage ponds. Photographs leaked to the press in 2014 showed seagulls bathing in the water. In some of the oldest laboratories, now decommissioned, it is unclear exactly how much or what kind of deadly material they contain. Most of the waste received at Sellafield today is reprocessed, but a stubborn remainder of around 3 per cent is left over. In lieu of a more permanent solution, this is mixed with liquid glass at 1,200 degrees Celsius. When it cools, the mixture vitrifies, forming solid blocks of irradiated glass. Sellafield houses six thousand steel containers of vitrified waste like huge toxic sugar cubes. The bitter material within will be lethal for thousands of years – still harmful to people for whom we will be little more than a rumour.

Other, more banal materials on this shore possess the same astonishing reach through time. We all carry packed lunches with us on our trip, which include a lot of foil- or plastic-wrapped sandwiches. We diligently take all our rubbish away with us, until we can deposit it in the nearest bin. The majority of Edinburgh’s household waste in fact ends up not far from this beach, in a landfill site lined with clay and plastic. Most modern landfills are constructed this way, creating an airtight and watertight seal to prevent toxic materials from leaching into the groundwater, effectively mummifying their contents. In the 1970s, an archaeologist called William Rathke became interested in what happens inside landfills. For the next twenty years he excavated sites around Tucson, Arizona, and reported finding forty-year-old hot dogs, twenty-five-year-old lettuce still in storefront condition, and – in the mid-1980s – an order of guacamole that looked ready to eat despite having been buried alongside a newspaper from 1967. If food can last for decades in mid-twentieth-century landfills, more durable materials like plastic and aluminum buried in modern landfill conditions will certainly retain recognizable forms for far longer.

Since the middle of the twentieth century we have produced enough aluminium, around five hundred million metric tonnes, to cover the whole of the United States in kitchen foil. The majority of the millions of tonnes of plastic that enter the ocean each year falls to the ocean floor, where it will be folded into the sediment as a layer in the geological strata, effectively a permanent addition – at least until the heat and pressure turn it back into oil or the section of seafloor is raised up and eroded, processes that will be measured in tens of millions of years. Even the contents of our sandwiches can tell a story. Sixty billion chickens are killed for human consumption each year; in the future, fossilized chicken bones will be present on every continent as a testimony to the intrusion of human appetites in the geological record. These most ordinary and familiar things, each with the potential to become a new fossil, bring the intimacies of the Anthropocene up close.

As we leave for our train back to Edinburgh, we turn away from this beach, but it will remember us.

FOOTPRINTS IS MY ATTEMPT to discover how we will be remembered by the very deep future. People have been modifying the land and changing ecosystems for thousands of years, but the alterations to the planet and the ever-more-durable materials we (mostly in the global North) have made since the industrial revolution have come with unprecedented speed and invention, and will leave long-lasting marks, beyond anything humans have produced before. In my search for future fossils, I look to the air, the oceans, and the rock, from a bubble of ice drawn from the heart of Antarctica to a tomb for radioactive waste deep beneath the Finnish bedrock. I examine the landscapes and objects that will endure the longest and the changes they will undergo: the processes that will transform a megacity into a thin layer of concrete, steel and glass in the strata; the future of the fifty million kilometres of roads that circle the planet and supply our cities with materials moved over vast distances; and the stories of those materials themselves, like the five trillion pieces of plastic waste already circulating in the world’s oceans.

But it is also a search for what will be lost. As biodiversity declines, silence will itself be a signal, absence another kind of trace. Bleached coral reefs, like the one I saw in Australia, will be monuments to this loss, but so will marine dead zones such as the huge area of anoxic water I visited in the Baltic Sea. Ice cores represent an astonishing archive of past climates, including the changes introduced by human activity, but as the ice melts, part of this record will go with it, while the loss of ice will write a new story in the planetary archive. There are also dangerous and highly durable substances like nuclear waste that we hope will remain hidden and forgotten altogether. And for all the many marks we will leave that cannot be mistaken – the deep pits we gouged in the earth and the rich pockets of landfill that hoard our waste – we will also leave our impression on worlds we can’t see. Microbial life is responsible for engineering virtually every key life process and chemical cycle, flooding the atmosphere with life-giving oxygen, but its role has been usurped. At the end of my journey I examine how our prints will linger in the cells of some of the smallest life-forms on earth.

To perceive future fossils means to see what the Anthropocene’s bright unbearable reality reveals; to look at a city as a geologist might, and to approach the problem of making nuclear waste safe from the perspective of an engineer; to understand the chemical stories in a piece of plastic waste, and to listen to the silences that echo in collapsed ecosystems. But it has also sent me back, again and again, to the essential elements of what I talk about with my students: to narrative, myth, image, and metaphor. I want to discover the world we will leave behind, but also how we will appear to the people who may live in that world. It’s an account of what will survive of us, and for that we need poets as much as we need palaeontologists. With stories we can see the world as it is and as it might be; art can help us imagine how close we are to the extraordinarily distant future.

We already know that the Anthropocene is a global story, but we don’t need to go far to find evidence of it. Future fossils are all around us, in our homes, in our workplaces, and even in our bodies. So my journey began in Edinburgh, and while it also led me to some very faraway places, it returned periodically to the North Sea world in which I feel at home. Much of my search also took place while I held a visiting fellowship at a university in Sydney, about as far from Scotland as it is possible to go, and a sweltering contrast with the northern climes I am accustomed to. At times, I found I had to seek out particular places to better understand their role in shaping our future traces: to learn about how cities might become fossils, I visited Shanghai, a city of twenty-four million people that has sunk under its own massive weight by over two metres in less than a hundred years. But what struck me most forcefully was how ubiquitous future fossils are. Our present is saturated with things that will endure into the deep future. As you read this, you will also, in all likelihood, be surrounded by objects and materials that could contribute to making a trace fossil. Before you begin to take this journey with me, look up from the page and imagine how the things around you – the plastic casing of your laptop and its titanium innards or the coffee cup standing beside it – might remain, even just as an impression in stone, millions of years from now.

Future fossils are not just a distant prospect to be left to the patient care of geological processes or the curiosity of generations yet to be born. They touch our lives hundreds of times every day, and we can see in them, if we choose, not only who we are but also who we could be. We have already fundamentally altered the systems that support life on the planet, in ways that are deeply sobering. The most vulnerable will be the worst affected, and the full costs to future generations have yet to be calculated. Our future fossils are our legacy and therefore our opportunity to choose how we will be remembered. They will record whether we carried on heedlessly despite the dangers we knew to lie ahead, or whether we cared enough to change our course. Our footprints will reveal how we lived to anyone still around to discover them, hinting at the things we cherished or neglected, the journeys we made and the direction we chose to take.

ONE
THE INSATIABLE ROAD

It was billed as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: the chance to walk Scotland’s newest stretch of road, spanning the banks of the Firth of Forth.

Since 1964, all road traffic across the estuary had been borne by the Forth Road Bridge, a burden comprising hundreds of millions of journeys north and south. The old bridge had begun to show the strain, though, and so a new one was commissioned. It took six years to complete. My family had followed its unhurried construction as the deck inched over the water and the web of cables slowly knitted together. From the beach near our house we could see the rising towers nudge above the hill between Edinburgh and South Queensferry, where the bridge was being built. Whenever we drove west from the city, my children would point out changes in its shape and size. Now it was finally ready to open, and to celebrate, a ballot had selected fifty thousand people to walk its 2.7-kilometre span across the estuary. We were lucky enough to be among them, and so on a golden Saturday in September, we set off to make on foot a journey that would thereafter be possible only at fifty miles per hour.

We met the bus that would take us the eight kilometres or so to South Queensferry in an industrial park on the outskirts of Edinburgh, and the new bridge rose into view as we travelled west along the estuary. At a distance, the Queensferry Crossing is a miracle of light and air, held in place by gleaming white threads strung from three spindle-like towers. The cables that lace it together resemble strings on the soundboards of a series of upended pianos, and the deck rises and dips like the harmonic curve in the neck of a harp. ‘How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!’ wrote Hart Crane of Brooklyn’s famous bridge. I wondered what enchanted music a strong North Sea wind might make as it barrelled down the estuary.

Our bus pulled into the empty multi-lane motorway just before the bridge’s southern rampart rose over the water, and we joined the crowds strolling north towards Fife. As the asphalt crunched under my feet, the airy impression I’d had from a distance resolved into something much weightier. The white cables, which had looked so slender, were thicker than my body. Viewed obliquely, they seemed to bond into a single white wall. The road surface was hard and unyielding, and fist-like rivets bulged from every knuckled stanchion and guardrail. The lightness, rather, was in me. I felt giddy walking on a surface never intended for foot traffic; it was as if in stepping out over the water we had also stepped into a wholly different relationship with the space around us. Uniquely, the bridge’s textures were there to be sampled: the cables’ bone-white smoothness, the glaucous sheen on the barriers between the carriageways, the road’s coarse grain. There was a thrill in the air, a mood of trespass. In reality, the event was subject to airport-levels of organization and stricture; bag-searched and photo-ID’d before we arrived at the bridge, we had firm instructions not to take longer than an hour or we would risk missing our return bus. But for a brief, beguiling moment, it felt like we were reclaiming the road.

Really, we have conceded so much. Most of us live and wander only where road networks permit us to, creeping along their edges and lulled into deafness by their constant roar. Man ‘sets his house upon the road’, lamented Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1849, and every day the human race goes forth and cuts a path for him to follow. But on this journey we could roam where we pleased, no longer confined to the curb; rather than the growl and whine of engines, the sounds were light and textured, of voices, laughter and the soft crump of hundreds of footsteps. This new road, built to withstand more than twenty million motorized journeys every year, seemed more like a road out of the pre-industrial past, a pilgrim route made by tramping feet. Or perhaps a vision of roads to come, when the oil is gone and the engines are silent.

At the base of each tower, a large sign listed the facts and figures of its construction. The bridge, which at a distance seemed to float above the water, was bound to the earth by superlatives. One hundred and fifty thousand tonnes of concrete and thirty-five thousand tonnes of Chinese steel, shipped to Rosyth from Shanghai shipyards, went into its construction, and thirty-seven thousand kilometres of cables, only just short of enough to circle the Earth at the equator. Laying the foundations for the south tower involved the longest ever continuous underwater pour of concrete: nearly seventeen thousand cubic metres, tipped night and day for fifteen days into the rock beneath the river. Excavating the site for the new network of roads that would connect to the bridge had revealed the remains of a Mesolithic sunken-floored house, the oldest dwelling ever discovered in Scotland. The remains of a clutch of post holes, now just shadows in the earth, along with charred hazelnut shells and fragments of burnt bone had survived in the mud for perhaps as long as eleven thousand years. But the aggregate seam of concrete pressed into the bedrock beneath the south tower, crushed Scottish granite or English limestone mixed with sand from India or China, will have a far more long-lasting presence, posing a riddle for future geologists to puzzle over.

A rude honking from the river barged through the chatter of voices as a container ship passed beneath us, sounding its horn in acknowledgment as it followed its own watery road.

At the bridge’s northern end, a small crowd had gathered around a knot of photographers. Scotland’s first minister was giving an interview, and we hovered for a chance to take our children’s picture with her. As they grinned for the camera, I looked to where the road flowed north through a coil of raised carriageways and sunken slip roads. Maybe a hundred metres away, a huge dolerite cliff loomed along the road’s eastern side. Engineers who built the first rail crossing over the estuary in the 1880s had punched their way through the gently rolling landscape, exposing to the air stone that had not felt wind or rain for millennia. They had cleaved their way through this mound of rock as if they were splitting a skull. If I had been passing over the bridge by car, I would have had barely seconds to notice it, lulled by the blur of asphalt slipping like grey silk under the car’s nose, perhaps registering the weight of rock as no more than a shadow in my peripheral vision. But free as I was to stand and stare, the exposed stone seemed to catch me up out of the present and draw me in, and through, and down into the memory of a younger earth.

At my back, that huge bolus of concrete slumbered beneath the river, curled around the base of the south tower like a dragon around a hoard of gold. As I gazed at the cutting, the bridge ceased to be a connection between the opposite banks of the river; it was, for an instant, poised between moments in time that flew beyond my imagination.

One million years from now, the bridge’s thin towers, its choir of shining cables and elegantly curving deck, will be long gone. The surface of the road will be washed away. But even as the eroding forces of weather and time take their toll, grinding down the cliff and filling the engineers’ clefts with sediment, the concrete foundation and the rock cutting will still be legible, written into the earth like speech marks around a lost quotation, bearing witness that here, once upon a time, a road crossed a river that will itself long since have vanished.

IT IS SAID that the world’s longest road is the Pan-American Highway. Really a dense network of interstate roads that wend and purl through seventeen countries, the highway runs unbroken from Alaska to the foot of Argentina, except for a 160-kilometre belt of rainforest between Central and South America. Its northernmost point is Prudhoe Bay, on Alaska’s Beaufort Sea, the site of the largest oil field in the United States. Barry Lopez writes that the thousands of oil-production wells that punctuate the bay make it seem more like a portion of West Texas transplanted to the Arctic tundra. From here, the road follows a gentle arc through Alaska’s Brooks Range to Fairbanks, then south into the Yukon, where it bends east around the northern tip of the Canadian Rockies and surges over the plains of Alberta, skirting the Athabasca tar sands, to Edmonton, where the road forks. One tine heads south and east, reaching the edge of the Great Lakes before doubling back along the rim of Lake Superior to Minneapolis, followed by Des Moines, and the Great Plains cities in Kansas and Oklahoma, and on to Dallas, past the sprawling oil fields of East Texas. The other takes a line south and west to Calgary, cuts through the Blackfeet, Flathead, and Crow reservations of Montana, then to Wyoming and the new shale plays in Western Colorado to Denver. Past Albuquerque the road begins to curve east, dipping under the wing of the West Texas oil fields, to meet and rejoin itself at San Antonio.

Jack Kerouac’s last trip in On the Road followed some of this western fork, from Denver to Mexico, as if it were an enchanted journey to reach a fabled city. Kerouac declared it the most fabulous road of all: miles and miles of ‘the magic south’. With Dean Moriarty, he burned through a thousand Texas miles, past a seemingly endless succession of gas stations, to San Antonio, then arced south to Monterrey through a gap in snow-topped mountains, crossing the swamps around Montemorelos and the desert plain, to where, he said, every road seemed to point: Mexico City.

Kerouac’s journey ended here, in spring 1950, in a sump of tropical fever that sent him limping back to New York. But the road that fuelled his imagination continues to push south. From Mexico City, it pours like sand through the hourglass waist of Central America to Panama, where it crosses the canal on the Centennial Bridge. Two hundred and sixty kilometres farther south, the road breaks, briefly and for the only time in its enormous span, frustrated by a barrier of rainforest and mountains called the Darién Gap, where Keats once imagined Cortez standing captivated by his first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean. It resumes in Colombia, winding through the Ecuadorian highlands to Quito, west of the oil fields of Lago Agrio and Pungarayacu, and skirting the edge of the Amazon rainforest. Here it tucks in behind the rampart of the Andes and follows the Pacific coast, past more oil fields in the waters lapping around Lima, to Valparaíso in Chile, where it abruptly strikes east along Route 60 (passing through the three-thousand-metre Cristo Redentor tunnel driven through the roots of the Andes) to the baroque esplanades of Buenos Aires.

The final leg of the journey hugs the Atlantic coast all the way to Tierra del Fuego. Bruce Chatwin describes travelling along this section of the road in In Patagonia, where he notes that the conquistadors named the region for the billowing domestic fires of the Fuegian Indians. Magellan called it the Land of Smoke (Tierra del Humo), but, Chatwin claims, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V ordered that it be renamed, reasoning that no smoke exists without fire. Chatwin’s journey took him through the Land of Fire along the final stretch of Argentina’s National Route 3, lit by the flares of oil rigs in the southern Atlantic rather than Magellan’s fires, to its terminus at Ushuaia, the world’s southernmost town, forty-eight thousand kilometres from where it began.

Modern roads connect the world we have made. It’s estimated that there are more than fifty million kilometres of roads worldwide, at least a third of which are sealed. That is enough paved surface to loop around the planet thirteen hundred times. China alone has more than four million kilometres of paved roads. The story our future fossils will tell is, in some respects, determined by this network. Many trace fossils are marks of passage, detailing where a creature passed through long ago. Although made by our machines rather than our bodies, roads will be as telling as any footprint in this regard. It’s a tale of massive displacements, of huge quantities of materials drawn from one place and laid to rest, like the bulb of concrete planted at the base of the Queensferry Crossing’s south tower, somewhere far away. But it’s also a story of the places that make the modern world possible – places excavated for their resources and left to ruin – that might seem very distant to those of us in the comfortable West, but to which we are intimately connected. And it’s about what flows through boreholes, pipes and engines and drives our need to keep extending the road: oil. ‘Oil is a fairy tale’, writes Ryszard Kapuściński. But like every fairy tale, Kapuściński cautions, oil is also a lie. It promises release, but in reality oil sticks us to the shadow places. To know this story, we need to know not only what will become of the roads themselves but also what they connect us to. Sealed asphalt and concrete may not receive a footprint, but nonetheless the road will be a reliable source of future fossils.

FIRST, THOUGH, we need to contend with a problem of perspective.

Roads furnish our imaginations with images of freedom. Journeys like Kerouac’s have come to stand for a sense of unimpeded progress and self-discovery, an open horizon connoting limitless possibility. Roads conjure what it feels like to be modern. They open up the world for us, but, as Emerson realized, they also dictate the direction we take. Roads accompany us for so much of our lives – how much time do any of us spend more than a hundred metres from a road, or out of earshot of their whispering voices? – and yet we have somehow trained ourselves not to really notice them at all.

In 1983, Vanity Fair commissioned the artist David Hockney to illustrate a story about the road trips Vladimir Nabokov undertook when he was writing Lolita. As he researched and wrote the novel in the 1950s, Nabokov crisscrossed the United States, driven always by his wife, Vera, in a 240,000-kilometre tapestry that stitched the east coast to the west. Hockney’s own road trip began with a journey through the Mojave Desert during an April storm. His subject was proving elusive, and the weather didn’t help. But the next morning, after some further desultory driving and photographing, Hockney proposed to his driver that they might find something promising at an intersection they had passed the day before. It took some time, but eventually they found it, and from the images he took over the next eight days Hockney would compose one of the twentieth century’s most iconic images of the road.

Pearblossom Hwy., 11–18th April 1986, #2 is a trap for the viewer’s perspective. A collage assembled from hundreds of individual photos, it depicts an unremarkable stretch of desert road where the Pearblossom Highway crosses California’s Route 138. The road tapers into the distance from a deep wedge in the foreground. Two parallel lines of thick yellow paint mark the division between lanes, running from the bottom edge of the picture to its midpoint, where it is bisected by the horizon of the blue, rippling Angeles Crest Mountains in the distance. Four road signs, yellow, green and red, track the right-hand side of the road towards its vanishing point; the scrub on either side is dotted with spiny Joshua trees and littered with discarded bottles, cans and cigarette packets. The upper portion of the painting is almost entirely taken up with the California desert sky, a big naive strip like the bar of blue a child might paint. The elements are simple and nondescript: asphalt, road signs, trees, mountains, sky. But the whole is dizzyingly precise. Every single image is taken in close-up and often head on (Hockney used a ladder to shoot the stop signs and to look directly down on each item of rubbish). Wherever it travels, the eye is arrested by detail; each crack in the painted road markings and flash of sunlight caught in the wrinkles of the crushed Pepsi can is intimately and immediately present.

Roads can do something odd to our sense of time and space. When we travel by road, we often do so in a kind of reverie. As a child, I would fill the boredom of long car journeys by imagining I was watching myself running alongside our car and leaping impossibly over the roadside clutter. It was a fantasy of perfect, unimpeded motion. Now, as I settle behind the wheel, other times and places – unresolved problems, anticipation of my destination, or unspooling threads of memories – fill my thoughts, and I find I can travel without really registering the world around me.

Seamus Heaney called this the ‘trance of driving’ and composed his poems under its spell, beating out their measure on the steering wheel. Many roads are laid out to suppress our sense of place. High verges built to muffle traffic noise also obscure our view of what lies beyond the road; the bland grey crash barriers barely register. The white lines progress relentlessly towards the horizon. For Joan Didion, driving on the freeway around Los Angeles involves a form of concentration so distilled as to become narcotic, ‘a rapture-of-the-freeway’. The lulling rumble of motor travel, the incantation of road signs marking the passage of miles, the low rush of our own slipstream – all can conspire to lift us out of time. In such moments we are, in a way, perfected. ‘The mind goes clean’, writes Didion. ‘The rhythm takes over’.

The history of modern road travel is the pursuit of the perfect road, the most frictionless way possible. A smooth passage through space is perhaps the fundamental promise of modern life, like a spell cast to release us from the heaviness pinning us to the earth.

This transmutation began in the nineteenth century with the railways. In the 1830s, mechanized transport increased the speed of travel by stagecoach by a factor of three, and in doing so put travellers by rail into a fundamentally different relationship with time and space. An 1839 article in the Quarterly Review remarked with breathless enthusiasm that under the influence of rail travel, the world would ‘shrivel in size until it became not much bigger than one immense city, and yet by a sort of miracle, every man’s field would be found not only where it always was, but as large as ever it was!’ Decades before Lewis Carroll subjected Alice to an enchanted regimen of shrinking and expanding, the railway had changed the world into a wonderland that mimicked the processes of geological time, contracting the planet’s greatest rivers to streams, its lakes to mere ponds.

With the invention of the motorcar, roads were built to mimic the perfection of the railway. Whereas the old highways had to adapt to the contours of the landscape, contorting to accommodate each immovable peak and valley, the railway simply drove its tunnels and cuttings through the earth. Twentieth-century roads were built to the same technical standards, forcing the land to submit to the demand for frictionless movement. The historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes that the mechanization of travel induced a corresponding mechanization of travellers’ sense of their place in the world. The velocity of rail travel – as much as forty miles per hour in the 1830s – destroyed the depth perception that defined pre-industrial place-consciousness. While objects at a distance could be observed in a newly panoramic vision, their aspect changing rapidly as the train sped past, the foreground was lost to a blur of indistinguishable shape and colour. Pre-industrial travellers, moving on foot or drawn by animals, would be immersed in their immediate environment, but after the railway most travellers would feel that they no longer occupied the same space as the objects they saw out of the window.

This detachment is the common experience of the road today. As we travel on it, we are caught up and carried away; inured to our surroundings, bounded by steel and glass, we are absorbed by infrastructure, numbed by vibration. As we observe the world through the cinema screen of the windscreen, our minds travel elsewhere while our bodies journey to their destination. Mechanical travel blunts our sense of the world. Emerson said the railway fed travellers’ egocentrism, reinforcing the impression that ‘whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable’. But in Pearblossom Hwy. #2, every intimate closeup detonates our sense of stability. Hockney’s collage stitches us back into the scene. The dulling patterns that remove us from the world – the regular pulse of road signs marking distance reminding us that what matters is not where we are but where we will be, and the white ticker-tape road markings clicking by endlessly insisting that ‘here’ is in fact always several metres ahead – are replaced by hundreds of single moments. As if to remedy the enchantment of the perfect road, Pearblossom Hwy. #2 returns us to the here and now – or, rather, to a here composed of countless ‘nows’. The road, it seems to suggest, is a charm that must be broken.

SEVERAL MONTHS after I walked with my family over the new bridge, I set off early one Sunday morning to cycle over the old one. It was one of those immaculate November days, lit by the mica-sparkle of frost on quiet streets. The air tasted rich and golden. The only sound was the quick, dry chatter of brown leaves under my wheels and, once, the indignation of a skein of geese nagging one another across the tall blue sky.

The original Forth Road Bridge, the one built in the early 1960s, had been closed to cars since the opening of the new crossing. Only buses used it now, as well as cyclists and pedestrians, but these were infrequent. I’d seen the old bridge when driving over the new one or standing on the shore, and it seemed abandoned. I wanted to stand on it free of the surging traffic it had once borne. Doing so, I felt, might give me a sense of what will happen to roads themselves after we are no longer around to travel on them.

As I cycled through South Queensferry, the cobbled street telegraphed each bump through my front wheel. At the far end of the high street, the road passed under the base of the old bridge, its concrete flanks stained by half a century of Scottish weather. To the left, a concrete path wound up the bank to the deck. As I rose onto the bridge, the low sun cast a brittle silver road on the water. A scatter of small fishing boats nodded mid-river, and the cables of the new bridge shone like a flotilla of sails about to depart. In the distance, I could see Blackness Castle on the southern shore, a fifteenth-century garrison known locally as ‘the ship that never sailed’ because its tapered fortifications point prow-like over the estuary. A single tanker was making its way slowly out to sea. Snow softened the Ochil Hills away to the northwest, and behind the lower hills that ran down to the river to the east, the cooling towers of an ethylene plant at Mossmorran sent up an immense gout of steam into the cloudless sky. Periodically, the plant’s operators burn off excess gas when the industrial processes need to be restarted. The Mossmorran flare can burn for days; when it does, I can see it lighting the sky from my bedroom window. The most recent flaring had been only a few weeks ago, blazing day and night like the eye of Sauron.

I have friends who live on a street near the old bridge and have spent a lot of time in its shadow. The traffic noise used to be constant, at times as thick as the haar, the sea fog that sometimes rolls in here from the North Sea. But now all that rush and clamour had evaporated into an eerie quiet. The wind was still, but even so, the sound of the thin line of cars on the Queensferry Crossing was swallowed up by the space between new and old bridges.

Whereas walking across the new bridge I had felt the lightness of a new beginning, crossing the old one, emptied like this, felt like an elegy. ‘The end of the road’ is often used figuratively to describe our sense of things coming to a close, or of terminal intent, but I think we rarely consider the end of roads themselves. The poet Edward Thomas knew this when he wrote, in 1911, that ‘much has been written of travel, far less of the road’. But here was a road poised as if on the cusp of disuse, before the cracks began to appear and weeds embraced its towers.

At the bridge’s end I passed through a deep cutting in the hillside to allow the road through. Its sides were decked cheerily with yellow gorse, but beneath this and a dusting of green moss the exposed rock glowered redly. I was reminded of Roy Fisher’s beautiful poem ‘Staffordshire Red’, about the enchanted experience of driving through a rock cutting. Surprised by a turn in the road that leads directly through a sandstone cliff in the English Midlands, the poet finds himself, for a moment, plunged into a primeval landscape of dripping ferns and green light. Before he knows it, the road drops him back into the mild Midlands landscape, revealing the portal to be no more than a nondescript clump of trees. And yet he feels, he says, somehow altered, compelled to follow the road in a wide arc around the county until it returns to the cutting and pours him again down ‘the savage cut in the red ridge’, to feel once more the ‘brush-flick of energy’ touched off by this fleeting contact with an ageless mystery lying in wait among the ferns and moss.

I wheeled my bicycle beyond the cutting, to the knot of slip roads that carried traffic onto and off the bridges. Here, for around a hundred metres or so, the roads approaching both bridges ran in parallel. As I stood on the entrance to the stilled old bridge, I could see a steady line of cars moving onto the new one, and for a moment it was as if I were standing not on the old road but on a prophecy of that new road’s future.

One day – whether because the exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves forces us to live within a more narrow compass or simply because humanity will, inevitably, no longer be around to use them – the roads that connect our towns and cities will be abandoned. The plant life we cut back to their edges will creep unchecked; their surfaces will split and rupture. Time will bring even the bold towers of this bridge down low. Although hard-wearing, most of it will be broken up and eroded. Persistent roots will worry away at their surfaces, and rains will wash them away. Some fragments, though, will be preserved as hints of the former whole. Like the oldest paved road in the world, a four-and-a-half-thousand-year-old stretch discovered near Cairo in the early 1990s, short sections will be buried beneath gathering sands, submerged by rising sea levels, or covered by land slips. Subject to unimaginable pressures that will warp and compress it, the hard-core base and asphalt surface will nonetheless be evident in the strata; and if, millions of years from now, the forces pressing one of these sections down into the earth are reversed, eventually the fossil road will be raised into the air like a new bridge. Embedded within this new cliff or mountainside, it will be a curious anomaly: a layer of rock that may have originated thousands of kilometres away from its resting place and a clue to the grey networks that once wrapped around the planet.

Tunnels have an even greater preservation potential, such as the twenty-five-kilometre Lærdal Tunnel in Norway – which is so long that it takes twenty minutes to travel through, and was built with three vast subterranean chambers, like the halls of mountain kings, each one lit to simulate sunrise to prevent drivers from falling asleep. The only real threats to their persistence into the deep future are earthquakes. The surface road network may yield only short fragments, each one only a kilometre or so in length. Perhaps less than 1 per cent of the Pan-American Highway will persist long enough to leave a fossil. Two hundred thousand years ago the Laurentide ice sheet reached as far south as Missouri – a new ice age would wipe away its entire northern section, while the weathering of the Andes will also erase stretches that pass through high latitudes. But the three kilometres that pass through the Cristo Redentor Tunnel would be protected, and tunnels like Lærdal and the Zhongnanshan Tunnel beneath China’s Qinling Mountains could preserve stretches of fossil roads twenty-five kilometres long, complete with curbstones, road signs, lighting, and painted road markings.

I turned back to the empty bridge and began to cycle home. As I was halfway over the river, a bus roared past. The slumbering deck trembled briefly, then returned to sleep.

ONCE UPON A TIME, writes the Nigerian novelist Ben Okri, a giant called the King of the Road lived in the forest. But as the forest shrank due to the people’s greed, he left and became the roads that the people travelled. He was a tyrant, with an appetite that could not be sated and the ability ‘to be in a hundred places at the same time’. Travellers left sacrifices for safe passage, but still, the immense appetite of the King of the Road exhausted the land, and famine arrived. The sacrifices stopped, and, enraged, the famished king began to attack the living and the dead. To mollify him, the people assembled an enormous offering, enough to feed an entire village. They delivered it to the King of the Road, who swallowed it in a single mouthful and then proceeded to eat the delegation who had delivered it to him.

When a second delegation met the same fate, the desperate people decided to kill the king. They collected poisons from every corner of the earth and added them to a lavish meal of fish, bushmeat, yams and cassava. This time, the ravenous king turned on the delegation first, then ate the feast they had brought in one swallow.

After this meal the King of the Road lay down, and his stomach began to ache. To quell the pain, he ate everything he could lay his hands on: rocks, sand, even the earth itself. Finally, the king turned on himself, consuming his own body until only his insatiable stomach remained. Rain fell for seven days and washed the king’s stomach into the earth. When the rain stopped, he was nowhere to be seen, but the people could hear his stomach growling beneath their feet.

‘The King of the Road had become part of all the roads in this world’, Okri writes in his novel The Famished Road. ‘He is still hungry, and he will always be hungry’.

The road is insatiable. Paved roads link together all the most fundamental and long-lasting changes we have made to the planet’s surface, from the deepest mines to the largest megacities; by them, we serve our addictions to finite resources. In the deep future our cities will be enormous sinks of countless future fossils, but virtually every last one will have originated far away and been transported to its new, distant resting place by roads. Each of the trillions of individual pieces of plastic in the world’s oceans reached the coast via a series of journeys down highways, from oil field to hand. Roads themselves create huge quantities of synthetic particles abraded from tyres and washed into seas and rivers, where they will eventually settle on the seafloor, to be sealed under a layer of mud. Burning fossil fuels has coated the surface of the planet in a thin layer of fly ash. These tiny carbonate particles have no natural sources and are so widespread across the globe in lake sediments and ice cores that they rival nuclear fallout as the primary signature of the Anthropocene. It’s thought that humans have modified more than half the planet’s land surface in some form or another. Roads open up remote regions for exploitation, linking them to urban or industrialized centres. Gaia Vince notes that every road driven through the Amazon rainforest is pursued by a ‘halo of deforestation’ fifty metres wide, leading to more landslides and erosion and contributing to an acceleration in the cycling of sedimentary materials around the planet. Humans now move more sediment on an annual basis than all the world’s rivers combined, around forty-five gigatonnes, increasing the likelihood that traces of us, including the roads themselves, will be buried and preserved as future fossils.

Underpinning all this is sand, the main ingredient in concrete and asphalt. Global demand for sand is exceeded only by the demand for water. Around forty billion tonnes are used annually in construction and road building, as well as in the manufacture of window glass, smartphone screens, silicate solar panels and cosmetics. It is a key ingredient in metal foundries and fracking for shale oil and gas, and also used in the creation of artificial land. Singapore has used imported sand to add 130 square kilometres to its landmass in the past forty years, and when completed, the Palm Islands complex in Dubai (including an archipelago of islands shaped like a map of the world) will have used over three gigatonnes of sand, equivalent to the weight of nearly eight Great Walls of China. Despite its abundance, desert sand is too fine for commercial use; instead, we’re dependent on the planet’s capacity to weather enough coarse sand from the backs of mountains and the sides of hills, and global demand is outstripping geological processes. The King of the Road is hungry still.

Okri’s Nigerian fable of the insatiable road sent me to the pictures of the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. Since the 1970s, Burtynsky has photographed manufactured landscapes – quarries, salt pans, railway cuttings – in pursuit of what he calls the ‘residual thing’, the trace of us and our demand for raw materials that will linger long after the landscape has been relinquished by humanity. Often his subjects, far from urban centres, are what the environmental philosopher Val Plumwood has called shadow places: unacknowledged places, those that are unseen and unthought of, but feed our desire for minerals or energy.

Burtynsky makes his images on an epic scale in every sense, often taking them from a great height with the help of cranes, helicopters, or drones. Distance alchemizes the landscape, producing what Burtynsky calls ‘mythic space’. From above, the scenes often resolve into patterns, revealing unnoticed geometries like abstract art, in which human figures are absent or reduced to tiny grains of colour (as he often works in industrial areas, the figures in the pictures usually wear yellow safety vests). The effect is detached, but not affectless. Burtynsky’s landscapes are emptied of people but full of human presence. What we see reflected back is ourselves, or rather our shadow selves, our hungry selves, which have gouged, cut, blasted, shaped, and hoarded the earth until it looks back at us like a face in a mirror.

Roads have played a significant part in shaping Burtynsky’s vision. His panoramic sense of landscape, he has said, emerged during long childhood journeys across Canada, watching ‘the endless country go by’. As a young photographer searching for an aesthetic, he took a two-week journey alone around the United States. A wrong turn in Pennsylvania led him to a coal mining town called Frackville, where the landscape so arrested him that all he could do was stop the car and stare. Wherever he looked, in any direction, there was nothing in the land that had not been made by human industry. Mounds of coal slag formed an arc of black hills, with pools of lime-green water at their feet. The only evidence of nonhuman life was the bone-white birch trees thrusting upwards through the slag. Burtynsky’s first thought was that he had somehow entered an alien world. The black land ‘totally destabilized me’, he said. ‘I thought, is this Earth?’ But he quickly came to realize that what he found in places like Frackville was the consequence of our addiction to fossil fuels, scoured into the rock and sediment. We are in the shadow places even when we don’t realize it.

Burtynsky’s images follow the appetites of the insatiable road. In 2007 he photographed open-cast mines in the West Australian gold fields. In one picture of the salt pan landscape around Lake Lefroy, a deep, belly-like crater is sunk hundreds of feet into the earth like the King of the Road’s stomach in Okri’s fable, starkly black against the white crusted plain, its ribbed layers picked out eerily in salt. In another, of the ‘Super Pit’ near Kalgoorlie, the mine’s true scale becomes apparent only when you notice the small town perched on its rim like a speckle of white lichen. The pit’s mouth yawns 3.5 kilometres across at its widest point, and plunges down 180 metres. A squiggle of access roads winds down to its tapering base. The mine extracts around twenty-three tonnes of gold per year, but every gram of gold involves the displacement of half a tonne of earth.

Our capacity to move sediment like this, far exceeding the rates produced by geological processes, will leave behind countless future trace fossils, both large and small, from vast craters like the Kalgoorlie Super Pit to the minerals themselves, which we have drawn from deep in the earth and scattered over its surface. Increased concentrations of gold, copper and platinum at the surface, as well as of the toxic heavy metals produced during mining such as cadmium, lead and mercury, will bear witness to the way we have relentlessly sought to feed our appetite for prized minerals. Geologists speak of our ability to distribute rocks and sediments far from their place of origin as comparable to the way glaciers drop erratic stones in distant valleys.

‘When you think about it’, writes Michael Mitchell about Burtynsky’s images, ‘there’s a big hole somewhere for every stone building on the planet.’ Burtynsky’s photographs of the Rock of Ages quarry in Vermont resemble the urban canyons of a city like New York. Cut into regular horizontal sections like the floors of a skyscraper, the ledges highlighted by a fortuitous snowfall, it seems as if a completed building has been lifted from the earth. Meltwater has streaked the grey granite walls to obsidian black. Michelangelo famously insisted that the statue is already inside the stone and that it is the sculptor’s task to reveal it (the first quarry Burtynsky photographed was Carrara in Italy, where the marble for Michelangelo’s statue of David was extracted). In Burtynsky’s photos, we are confronted with a kind of ghost architecture, as if our cities were somehow excavated whole.

IN 1997 BURTYNSKY HAD what he calls an ‘oil epiphany’: that all the many manufactured landscapes he had photographed ‘had been made possible by the discovery of oil’. He resolved to trace with his camera the immensely complex infrastructure of fossil fuels, from extraction to the depleted fields and devastated landscapes it leaves behind. A few weeks after my trip over the old Forth Road Bridge, I visited the university library to look at Oil, the book that gathers together the results of Burtynsky’s quest.

Much of its first half has a heroic tenor. Wide-angle pictures of California oil fields are filled with a boundless herd of thousands of nodding derricks, docile and bovine, cropping the desert as far as the horizon, recalling the lost buffalo herds of the American plains. In Burtynsky’s images of oil refineries, miles of glistening pipes are crammed into the frame, arterial skeins that hint at symmetry but also elude it. Some show the world made possible by oil. In Highway #5, an aerial shot of the intersection between Highways 105 and 110 in Los Angeles (where the opening song-and-dance number to La La Land was filmed), the road is elevated to mythic proportions. The city’s sprawl fills the picture right to the edges, and as far as the San Gabriel Mountains to the north. But everything is dwarfed by the road – the endless rows of paperlike houses, even the huddle of downtown skyscrapers, are diminished, dominated by the prodigious, oesophageal multi-lane highway unfurling from the intersection and bulging and twisting away northwards.

The image reminded me of the work of the science fiction writer J. G. Ballard, who claimed to prefer concrete landscapes to meadows and predicted that the freeway system will be all that remains of Los Angeles once the city has faded into memory. People of the future, Ballard suggested, will see its slipways and overpasses as enigmatic testaments to our standard of beauty, just as we look admiringly on the mausoleums of Giza.

Other pictures ask us to imagine oil’s shadow worlds. Burtynsky turns his camera on an exhausted oil field in Baku, Azerbaijan, the site of perhaps the world’s first industrialized oil field and the largest in the world at the start of the twentieth century, from which oil had been dug since at least the fifteenth century. Skeletal derricks and towers, emaciated and blackened or rust-blushed, take the place of the placid, nodding machinery in the Californian photos. In the foreground, angular metal debris points to the sky like the ribs of desiccated cattle.

Ten million years from now, every human structure that exists on the surface of the earth will have been worn away. The largest and most extensive trace fossils of us will be underground. Animals can burrow to a depth of around two and a half metres; the deepest plant roots reach less than seventy metres. Humans, by contrast, have dug holes deeper than any life-form has ever gone before: the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia’s remote north-west is only twenty-three centimetres in diameter, but it descends more than twelve kilometres into the ground, far below even the deep-dwelling microbial communities that inhabit pockets and fractures in the rock up to five kilometres down. And we have done so everywhere. Beneath each grazing Californian derrick and pinched, leaning tower in Baku is a borehole perhaps up to a kilometre deep; worldwide, there are thousands of similar boreholes on every continent save Antarctica. The Anthropocene Working Group estimates that, laid end to end, they would make a borehole around fifty million kilometres in depth – equivalent to the total paved road network, or seven metres for every person alive today. Whereas surface roads will be preserved only in fragments, these boreholes will be sheltered from erosion. Some may be crimped and compressed by metamorphic processes, or gradually raised to the surface and weathered to dust, but others will be there in perpetuity, columns opening deep into the earth, coated in residual oil and barium-laced mud. Closed mines will lead to huge subterranean voids where, in our drive for coal, we have removed entire strata.

The insatiable road will be the source of some of the most telling future fossils. Even in fragments, they will hint at the extent of our reach across continents and into every wilderness. An astute observer of these splinters might be able to pull together an even larger story, of thriving megacities and planet-spanning industries, of our thirst for fossil fuels and the depths to which we have pursued them. Even more incredibly, beneath the sea some of the longest roads, passing between the continents, may survive intact.

In the final section of Oil, Burtynsky visits ship-breaking yards in Chittagong on the coast of Bangladesh. A series of dangerous accidents in the late 1990s and early 2000s involving heavy-fuel oil tankers off the French coast led to the banning of single-hulled tankers and spawned a new industry, as dozens of ships were beached at Chittagong to be broken down for scrap and recycled. In Burtynsky’s pictures, the partially dismantled tankers have assumed sculptural or even topographical forms. Ships minus their prows reveal their hulls in cross-section-like strata in an iron cliff; some have become metal escarpments and overhangs. It is a desperately precarious industry, undertaken by barefoot men using little more, Burtynsky says, than ‘torches and gravity’. Injuries and fatalities are commonplace, and their working environment is a malign concoction of oil and flakes of highly toxic marine paint. As the ships are broken down, they can yield as much as fifty thousand metres of copper cable, dozens of kilograms of aluminium and zinc, and tens of thousands of litres of oil. In the process, the ships are whittled away to almost nothing.

And yet, even before they come to rest on the Chittagong beach, they have played a part in creating future fossils. Although dumping shipping waste in the ocean was banned in 1972, it’s estimated that more than six hundred thousand tonnes enters the water every year, mostly hard and soft plastic, tin cans, and fishing gear. Some will be carried by currents and end up in debris traps in submarine canyons or seafloor depressions, but enough will likely remain concentrated around the routes of major shipping lanes to indicate that this was once a watery road. These plastic seafloor trails are laid on top of layers of hard clinker, the coal-burning residue dumped over the side of steamships in the nineteenth century. Many ships also disposed of extra clinker in port when they cleaned their boilers. These tough pavements connect the major port cities of the nineteenth century like Liverpool and New York, and have already been covered by sediment, preserving them from erosion. Unlike the road network on land, which will leave only fragmentary clues about its extent, a future geologist will be able to reconstruct much of the major shipping network from these clinker roads beneath the sea.

I peered at Burtynsky’s pictures of oil and its afterlives for two hours, scribbling notes and impressions, until hunger finally broke my concentration. But as I turned the last pages, making ready to leave the library, the final image struck me totally still. The camera peers directly down from ground level at a shuffle of footprints pressed into the Chittagong mud just as the Happisburgh footprints had been, eight thousand miles away and over eight hundred thousand years earlier. But these ones gleamed blackly. The mud had dried and split, and oil spilled from the broken tankers had flowed through the cracks to fill the footprints just exactly to the brim.

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