Is man now more important than nature in shifting soil and rocks around the planet?
I don’t know about any articles on this, but as a practising geologist, I can safely say that man’s role in shifting soil and rocks is still miniscule compared with natural processes. Consider the amount of wind-blown sand in deserts or the amount of sediment carried down via rivers, deltas etc into the sea. The amounts of material are staggeringly huge! On the other hand don’t believe any pseudo-religious mumbo jumbo about such rates of erosion being so huge that the continents would have been levelled. People who peddle this stuff rarely have any real knowledge about geology. The rates of erosion ARE huge, but they are not consistent and therefore it’s not appropriate to use modern-day average rates. A lot of erosion can happen in a short space of time (think landslips, floods, catastrophic climate events) separated by periods of relative quiescence. However, these huge rates of erosion are easily are offset by uplift due to continental collision, (plate tectonics) and isostacy (or “
