In addition to the garbage dumps and the pollution of the ocean, plastic can turn into a stone. Scientists have discovered a new type of rock, cobbled together from plastic, volcanic rock, shells and corals on the beaches of Hawaii.
Found a new mineral geologist Patricia Corcoran of the University of Western Ontario, and Charles Moore, captain of the Oceanographic research vessel Alguita. Researchers report that found the stones, which they dubbed "plastiglomerates", formed from melting plastic in fires or bonfires. Corcoran says: "wherever there are heat sources such as forest fires or lava flows, and the abundance of plastic debris, there is the potential for the formation of plastiglomerate. When plastic melts, it cements rock fragments, sand, or plastic can turn into larger rocks and fill in cracks and bubbles to form a kind of trash rock."
Geologist Philip Gibbard of the University of Cambridge was confident that, eventually, the plastic melts and the rocks will pass through hell's depth and temperature in tectonic processes and the plastic can "return to the source of oil from whence they came, under favorable conditions of burial". But other scientists are not so optimistic. They say that some of these materials can be stored in the form of a thin film of carbon.
Source: nauka24news.ru/