ELI5: How did humans discover chalk, and how did it become so popular in schools and sold in stores? I don’t know about geology but we might run out of chalk kinda quickly right?
ELI5: How did humans discover chalk, and how did it become so popular in schools and sold in stores? I don’t know about geology but we might run out of chalk kinda quickly right?
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We found soft rocks that left marks when we dragged them on other rocks. It’s literally a prehistoric discovery. It got popular because it was useful.
Humans are good at testing new things they find on other things. Given you can just pick up a piece of raw chalk of the ground and write with it people would have figured this out very quickly.
And it’s extremely common, huge areas of land around the world sit on chalk beds. I can’t even find an estimate of how much there is in total, there’s just too much of it. So while it is a limited resource it’s probably one of the least limited resources that we currently mine.
It’s unlikely we will run out of chalk. It’s a soft, sedimentary rock formed from the remains of microscopic marine organisms like plankton, seashells, algae, etc, over millions of years. Chalk deposits are widespread and abundant.
If running out of chalk is a concern of yours, then you are living a life I wish I could be a part of. However, maybe the climate catastrophe that is bleaching choral reefs will provide us more chalk?