GC: n
CT: For less than two dollars, you can purchase a 10-pack of the bestselling pen in the world. Since being introduced in the 1950s, almost 150 billion Bic Cristals have been made. The pen is an exceedingly ordinary item found in most schools and workplaces across the globe. But it harbors a tiny secret. Inside the tip sits a one-millimeter-diameter perfect sphere made of tungsten carbide. It’s this minuscule ball that gives the pen its name and allows it to draw smoothly across a sheet of paper.
The compound tungsten carbide doesn’t exist in nature; it was engineered to be nearly as tough as diamonds and is likely as long-lasting. Highly resistant to wear, heat, impact, and corrosion, tungsten carbide isn’t found just in pens. Trekking poles, guitar slides, armor-piercing shells, and fishing weights all use it too. Millions of years from now, fragments of these items will remain deep in the earth. They will never degrade, serving as a geological time stamp to mark humanity’s presence on the planet.
A ballpoint pen is a technofossil, just like a cellphone, its charger, leather shoes, and plastic-laced tea bags. Paleontologist Sarah Gabbott explains that a technofossil is “anything that is man-made, including all the new materials that we’ve made.” Gabbott and geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, colleagues at the University of Leicester, examine technofossils and their impact on Earth in their recent book, Discarded: How Technofossils Will Be Our Ultimate Legacy. Technofossils can be as small as a single radioactive particle, carried on the wind from a testing site, or they can be as large as an entire city, slumping into the sea after decades of climate change. What defines technofossils is their human element. They are unique to our species and terrifically specific to our current time.
S: NatGeo (last access: 2 February 2026)
N: 1. From combining form “techno-” (word-forming element active from mid-19c. and meaning “art, craft, skill,” later “technical, technology,” from Latinized form of Greek tekhno-, combining form of tekhnē “art, skill, craftsmanship, craft in work; method, system, an art, a system or method of making or doing,” from PIE *teks-na- “craft” (of weaving or fabricating), from suffixed (or reduplicated) form of root *teks- “to weave,” also “to fabricate”), and noun “fossil” (1610s, “any thing dug up;” 1650s (adj.) “obtained by digging” (of coal, salt, etc.), from French fossile (16c.), from Latin fossilis “dug up,” from fossus, past participle of fodere “to dig,” from PIE root *bhedh- “to dig, pierce”).
2. technofossil (plural technofossils):
- (neologism) A fossil formed from an industrial man-made object or material.
3. As the story goes, the first evidence of technofossils occurs about two million years ago, as the mineralized traces of the technologies used by early hominids to pound, cut and dig. For stratigraphers, these fossils are the geological equivalents of “trace fossils”: the mineralized remnants of animal-made structures that record a creature’s activities, like the fossilized burrows of worms, the stone nests of wasps, and the mineralized footprints of dinosaurs. These offer lithic testimonies to lives lived millions or even hundreds of millions of years ago. The trace fossils of the Cambrian Period are geologically significant for their sudden appearance, volume and diversity, giving witness to the rapid emergence of most of the planet’s major animal phyla 542 million years ago. This abrupt upsurge of life makes the Cambrian the stand-out event in terms of the Earth’s evolutionary trajectory. However, for those geologists advancing the notion of the Anthropocene, the “Cambrian explosion” now has a rival.
5. Cultural Interrelation: We can mention the chapter Technofossil by Jared Farmer, from the book Future Remains A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (2018) by Gregg Mitman , Marco Armiero and Robert Emmett.
S: 1. Etymonline – https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=techno-, https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=fossil (last access: 1 February 2026); MW ((last access: 1 February 2026). 2. Wiktio (last access: 1 February 2026). 3. ResearchGate (last access: 1 February 2026). 4. TUCP (last access: 1 February 2026).
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CR: anthropocene, environmental sustainability.
