Humans have been around for only about 0.01% of Earth’s history, yet we’ve altered natural landscapes and processes that have remained stable for millions of years. A team of researchers from the University of Glasgow recently studied a formerly sandy beach in the UK that highlights how fast these changes can occur.

Industrial steel and iron furnaces operated extensively in the UK from 1856 until the 1980s. During these decades, workers dumped roughly 335 million cubic meters (90 billion gallons) of molten furnace waste, called slag, across the country. Of that, roughly 27 million cubic meters (6 million gallons) now sits on the coast of Derwent Howe in a massive 30-meter (100-foot), solidified cliff. 

The researchers analyzed this region to understand how man-made, or anthropogenic, materials influence the way rocks form. Rocks naturally form and change into different types of rocks over million-year timescales, through a continuous process called the rock cycle. When the team uncovered a soda can tab manufactured in 1989 within the hardened grains, or clasts, of slag, they concluded that the beach had solidified within the last 35 years. Based on this discovery, they proposed a new term for rocks formed from anthropogenic sediments: the anthropoclastic rock cycle. 

The team collected 1,300 grains of sediment from 13 sites in the study area and found that 83% were slag. Natural beach sediments, like quartz sand, comprised only about 17% of the grains. As wind and waves broke down the cliff, slag clasts fell off and became rounded by friction as tides transported them from the cliff to the beach. 

At the boundary where the slag touched the beach, the researchers also saw evidence that the slag had seeped into the underlying wet sediment. The rocks there resembled a type of rock called peperite, which forms when lava flows over wet, loose sediments.  They concluded that this peperite-like rock formed as the molten slag flowed over the still sandy beach. Slag is much thicker than wet sand, so the resulting rock looked like blobs of slag encased in sandy rock. 

The researchers then visually observed how the slag grains were arranged in the solidified rock to reconstruct the tidewater speeds at different points in the coast’s history. The different ways sediments are arranged within a rock are called sedimentary features, and they reflect the processes that formed the rock. For example, as water flows over sand, it forms small, dune-like ripples. When the sand beds harden into rock, the ripples are preserved as features known as trough cross-bedding. 

Faster water erases any ripple formations and instead forms horizontal layers in the sediment, known as planar lamination. The researchers observed both trough cross-bedding and planar laminations preserved in the slag beach rocks. These sedimentary features indicate that the beach at Derwent Howe turned from loose sediment into rock in a generation. 

To investigate why this beach rapidly solidified, the researchers scanned the surfaces of the beach rock with electron beams and X-rays using a scanning electron microscope, or SEM, equipped with an energy dispersive X-ray, or EDX. Every chemical element emits a unique set of X-rays with different wavelengths when hit with EDX, so the researchers could compare the X-rays from their samples to databases of known mineral X-ray signatures. They identified the primary binding agents as calcium- and iron-rich minerals like calcite, goethite, and brucite. These minerals are called cements because they bind grains of sediment together. 

The researchers expected the slag to produce these cement compositions, since extracting metal ores from rock enriches the resultant slag in calcium, magnesium, manganese, and iron, which readily dissolve in water. When water flowing between closely packed slag grains can no longer hold additional dissolved elements, those elements precipitate as solid mineral cements. Since cements only form when the water has very high concentrations of dissolved elements, the introduction of massive amounts of slag caused the cement to form faster than it would in waters with lower concentrations of elements.

The researchers suspected that the anthropoclastic rock cycle they observed at Derwent Howe is not uncommon. Since slag contains all the elements necessary to form rocks when in contact with seawater and air, slag deposits all over the world could be rapidly influencing their local environments. With this in mind, the team suggested that future researchers update geological models to account for human contributions to the natural rock cycle. 

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An unusual phenomenon that has been recognized around the world for more than a century has finally been resolved: what are the origins of the distinctive, stair-like ridges that form on steep hillsides?

These features, known as “terracettes,” have long puzzled scientists, and the question of how they form has attracted some of history’s greatest minds, including Charles Darwin.

The famous naturalist described these features as “Little horizontal ledges, one above another,” which he said had been “observed on steep grassy slopes in many parts of the world.”

According to Darwin, the formation of terracettes had “been attributed to animals traveling repeatedly along the slope in the same horizontal lines while grazing,” although he adds that “Professor Henslow (a most careful observer) told Sir J. Hooker that he was convinced that this was not the sole cause of their formation,” with the implication that these curious, structured features on steep hills might have geological origins, rather than those attributable solely to biology.

Now, researchers may finally have an answer to this pastoral riddle that baffled the likes of Darwin more than a century ago, settling the scientific debate over their origins.

Solving the Mystery of Terracettes

Benjamin Seleb, the lead author of a new study detailing the findings, said the mystery of terracettes first attracted his attention in 2024 after he observed them firsthand during a hike in the Alps.

“I suspected the numerous grazing cows—hard to miss with their clanking bells—had something to do with it, and was already sketching out how I would model their movement before the hike was over,” Seleb says.

“It wasn’t until I got back to my hotel and started digging into the topic that I learned about the contested origins of these terracettes,” Seleb adds. “With my curiosity piqued, I got to work building a simple model to ask whether grazing animals really could reshape mountains.”

According to Seleb and a team of collaborators from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, computer modeling was employed to reshape hillsides into these distinctive “stepped” formations. The findings reveal that the most likely explanation is that repetitive pathways followed by grazing animals such as sheep and cattle produce remarkably ordered landscape patterns over time.

Simulating ‘Chaos’ to Solve a Mystery

To test their hypothesis, the research team simulated the movement of individual animals across steep slopes. For their analysis, they also introduced a few rules, which revealed that the “virtual grazers” preferred traversing hillsides in long, horizontal pathways that form gradual inclines. This makes sense, since it is a method of ascent that requires less energy, and humans have also traditionally employed similar approaches (think of mountain trails, which, rather than ascending straight uphill, follow longer sloping inclines and switchbacks where directional changes are necessary).

With each simulated footstep, soil and vegetation become compacted, producing subtle alterations to the terrain over time. As these pathways form, animals over successive future generations are thereby encouraged to follow similar routes, and with time, the familiar terraced patterns emerge.

“People have argued about terracettes for over a century,” says Professor Saad Bhamla, one of the study’s co-authors and leader of the Bhamla Lab of Extraordinary Organisms, which describes its efforts as work that “seeks to understand how organisms do amazing things.”

“Some say [terracettes] are purely geological, just slow soil creep and slumping,” Bhamla recently said. “Others say animals create them, and the standard criticism for the animal-origin camp is that the animals wander around randomly, so how could they ever carve something this regular?”

“What we show is that they can and that this regularity emerges out of that chaotic, random movement, not in spite of it, through the back-and-forth between the animals and the ground they’re chewing up with their mouths and packing down with their feet,” Bhamla adds.

Complexity from Simple Movement

Bhamla and his team say their research offers another example demonstrating how complex natural landscapes can emerge from simple, uncoordinated behavior, involving a process known as stigmergic feedback. This involves organisms that gradually reshape their shared environment over time.

The result of their work is an answer to a mystery that has persisted for many generations, and not only that, but also a pathway toward understanding the various ways animals influence landscapes more broadly.

The team’s findings were detailed in a new paper, “Moo-ving mountains: grazing agents drive terracette formation on steep hillslopes,” which appeared in Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

An unusual discovery on the Red Planet has revealed an odd-looking series of polygon-shaped structures, documented in new images obtained by NASA’s Curiosity Rover.

The curious features were discovered after Curiosity was dispatched to an area of interest on the Martian terrain initially identified from orbital imagery obtained by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Upon its arrival at the area, which the satellite imagery had conveyed as appearing light in coloration and apparently smooth-surfaced, Curiosity discovered something vastly different.

Curiosity Uncovers a Martian Honeycomb

Writing at NASA’s Curiosity blog, Senior Research Scientist William Farrand of the Space Science Institute described the area in question as being “covered with polygonal structures like the top of a giant Martian honeycomb.”

Polygonal structures are a frequent occurrence in nature, as evidenced by the Curiosity team’s likening them to a “honeycomb” in appearance. Similar polygon-shaped features are often seen in geology, such as the famous Giant’s Causeway on Northern Ireland’s Antrim Coast, which consists of close to 40,000 interlocking basalt columns that bear a similar appearance to the features recently discovered on Mars by Curiosity.

This is also not the first time such features have been observed by Curiosity. Last May, NASA revealed similar discoveries of structural features resembling honeycomb or “waffle” patterns.

As Curiosity proceeded into the unusual area, imagery provided by the rover revealed additional polygonal features, albeit in a more eroded condition than the features it initially spotted.

“Littered about this unit are pebble to cobble-sized dark-toned rocks,” Farrand wrote, adding that among the unresolved questions researchers with the Curiosity team have “is whether these are bits of Mars that ‘floated’ down from higher in the stratigraphy, were ejected from distant impacts outside of Gale crater, or are meteorites from beyond Mars altogether.”

Clues Pointing to Meteorites?

A potential clue arises from the presence of nickel Curiosity detected in some of the darker stones. This may be significant, since nickel is generally rare in Martian rocks.

The same can’t be said for meteorites, though, which often contain an abundance of nickel and other metals. On Earth, meteors that flash in vivid shades of green as they collide with Earth’s atmosphere do so when nickel and magnesium are present within these space rocks.

It remains unclear whether all the darker-colored stones discovered by Curiosity are possible fragments from a meteorite or if their appearance is due to other factors that remain undetermined.

“Further investigations should help in answering this question,” Farrand added.

Ongoing Research by Curiosity

On Monday, June 29, 2026, Curiosity continued its investigations of these unusual features with its APXS and MAHLI instruments, with further plans to conduct additional viewing of an area the Curiosity team has dubbed the Miraflores butte, which features a small knob-like prominence.

Additional viewing was planned for the nearby Cordillera mesa as well, although much of the rover’s work has remained focused on the unique polygon-shaped structures.

“After driving further towards the upper boundary of the light-toned, polygon-covered unit, the three-sol Friday plan included APXS and MAHLI measurements of another polygon ridge and one of the dark-toned cobbles,” Farrand’s update at the Curiosity blog noted.

This particular cobble, which the Curiosity team has dubbed “Cortadera,” was studied using the rover’s ChemCam instrument, which was also used in observations of the aforementioned features, and others in the nearby Martian terrain.

In the days ahead, Curiosity is expected to traverse another area where dark-colored materials are present based on previous orbital reconnaissance, which may provide additional clues about their origins, and the intriguing features in the area where the rover’s current investigations are focused.

Additional details can be found at NASA’s Curiosity blog.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.