This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. When we look at a rock, we often just focus on its size and appearance. Is it light or heavy? Dark or ...

Dr David Brown, the paper’s third co-author, said: “On coasts like Derwent Howe, the process of lithification has turned a sandy beach into a rocky platform very, very quickly.

Dr David Brown, the paper’s third co-author, said: “On coasts like Derwent Howe, the process of lithification has turned a sandy beach into a rocky platform very, very quickly.

“This gives us a maximum time frame of 35 years for this rock formation, well within the course of a single human lifetime.” Other discoveries include a zipper, copper wire, and even a tire.

Industrial waste can turn into rock in as little as 35 years, new research reveals, instead of the thousands or millions of years previously assumed.

Developing ideas about the rock cycle Over time there have been lots of different theories about the age of the Earth. For thousands of years, most people believed that the Earth had always been ...