The Civilization Record
Matter and Biosphere
Humanity did not only use energy; it also pulled the planet's matter out of place, transformed it and reassembled it at an ever larger scale.
The material resources the first communities used were small in scale. Farming enlarged the use of soil and biomass. Cities and industry then turned stone, sand, clay, metal and fossil raw materials into flows of millions of tonnes.
Today humanity extracts about 85 billion tonnes of material a year. The bulk of it is minerals used in construction: sand, gravel, stone and other minerals.
This transformation did not only grow the human-made world; it also shrank the mass of the biosphere. While global living plant biomass has fallen by about half across human history, the technosphere, made of concrete, asphalt, metal, plastic and other human-made materials, reached the same scale as all living biomass around 2020.
So humanity's mark on the planet can be measured not only by the area it uses or the energy it consumes, but also by the material mass it has accumulated on Earth.
Worth knowing
Human-made mass passed all living biomass around 2020; net new technosphere mass is being added at around 10 tonnes per person per year.
Today 96% of land-mammal biomass is human and domestic; 4% is wild.
Pre-industrial wild-mammal biomass was 6-7 times today's; plant biomass was twice today's and has halved.
Construction sand and gravel is the most-extracted solid material after water: around 50 Gt a year.