Technofossils are totems for modern persons and future civilizations to visualize the earth’s petrochemical epoch. They preserve those resources that would be consumed and make visible chthonic disturbances that are without precedent in Earth’s history. They are a form of geologic preservation: concretizing the subterranean landscapes of now. Tethered to their cavities of origin, each core is cast into orbit, free of Earth’s weathering atmosphere. The resultant voids function dually as platforms for looking upward at the lofted core and downward into the Earth’s primordial interior.
Technofossils are extracted from three sites that mark the critical phases of our petrochemical epoch: extraction, consumption, and transformation. One, from Kellingley Colliery, cores the last deep coal mine in England. A second, at the Choctaw Salt Dome in Plaquemine, Louisiana, unearths a cavernous salt mine used for natural gas storage and, one day, sequestration. A core from Bayan Obo Rare Earth Mine in Inner Mongolia embodies transformation and its associated perils. Renewable energy technologies such as wind turbines, electric vehicles, and other instruments rely on lanthanides to perform.
