“Few domestic animals would remain after a couple of hundred years. On Staten Island, Fresh Kills’s four giant mounds of trash would be flattened, their vast accumulation of stubborn PVC plastic and glass ground to powder. There, relic groves of huge ash and linden trees rise 138 feet above an understory of hornbeams, ferns, swamp alders, massive birches and crockery-size fungi. Your website access code is located in the upper right corner of the Table of Contents page of your digital edition.Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science newsGiven the mounting toll of fouled oceans, overheated air, missing topsoil and mass extinctions, we might sometimes wonder what our planet would be like if humans suddenly disappeared. (Credit: Glen Wexler) Otters, Asiatic black bears, musk deer and the nearly vanquished Amur leopard would spread into slopes reforested with young daimyo oak and bird cherry. Pigeons would genetically revert back to the rock doves from which they sprang.It’s unclear how long animals would suffer from the urban legacy of concentrated heavy metals. A dry lightning strike, igniting decades of uncut, knee-high Central Park grass, would spread flames through town.As lightning rods rusted away, roof fires would leap among buildings into paneled offices filled with paper. He says there were 30 to 40 streams in Manhattan when the Dutch first arrived.
“At least a dozen species in the ocean Columbus sailed were bigger than his biggest ship,” says marine paleoecologist Jeremy Jackson of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Dogs would go feral, but they wouldn’t last long: They’d never be able to compete.”If people were no longer present anywhere on Earth, a worldwide shakeout would follow. Over many centuries, plants would take these up, recycle, redeposit, and gradually dilute them. Smart Guide to Climate Change 404 error Sorry, page not found! Our daily newsletter arrives just in time for lunch, offering up the day's biggest science news, our latest features, amazing Q&As and insightful interviews.
“The plants, crops, and animal species man has wrought by his own hand would be wiped out in a century or two,” Wilson says. The few Siberian tigers that still prowl the North Korean-Chinese borderlands would multiply and fan across Asia’s temperate zones. From zebra mussels to fire ants to crops to kudzu, exotics would battle with natives. Hawks and falcons flourish, as do feral cats and dogs. With no further chlorine and bromine leaking skyward, within decades the ozone layer would replenish, and ultraviolet damage would subside.
PLUS a free mini-magazine for you to download and keep. Although wolves dig under it, and roe deer are believed to leap over it, the herd of the largest of Europe’s mammals remains divided, and thus its gene pool. Oysters filtered all the water in Chesapeake Bay every five days. For centuries it stayed that way. Occupying Germans took lumber and slaughtered game during World War I, but a pristine core was left intact, which in 1921 became a Polish national park. Belarus, which has not removed its statues of Lenin, has no specific plans to dismantle the fence. Eventually, heavy metals and toxins would flush through the system; a few intractable PCBs might take a millennium.During that same span, every dam on Earth would silt up and spill over. The world would start over.If humans were to vanish from New York, how soon would nature take over? Would the seas again fill with fish? The acidic soil and high altitude – leading to relatively high levels of ultra-violet radiation – don’t help either. Within 20 years, the water-soaked steel columns that support the street above the East Side’s subway tunnels would corrode and buckle, turning Lexington Avenue into a river.New York’s architecture isn’t as flammable as San Francisco’s clapboard Victorians, but within 200 years, says Steven Clemants, vice president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, tons of leaf litter would overflow gutters as pioneer weeds gave way to colonizing native oaks and maples in city parks. An amazing megafaunal menagerie roamed the region: Giant armadillos resembling armor-plated autos; bears twice the size of grizzlies; the hoofed, herbivorous toxodon, big as a rhinoceros; and saber-toothed tigers. Aside from rare military patrols or desperate souls fleeing North Korea, humans have barely set foot in the strip since 1953. Places like the Indian Point nuclear power plant, 35 miles north of Times Square, would dump radioactivity into the Hudson long after the lights went out.Old stone buildings in Manhattan, such as Grand Central Station or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, would outlast every modern glass box, especially with no more acid rain to pock their marble.