One Bag of Cheetos Nearly Broke a Cave That Took Millions of Years to Build

A visitor to Carlsbad Caverns National Park dropped a bag of Cheetos. Park officials issued a public alert. Scientists explained why this was not, in fact, an overreaction.

The dropped snack bag significantly disturbed a cave ecosystem almost entirely cut off from the outside world. The formations and microbial communities inside exist in an equilibrium that took geological time to establish. Artificial food, foreign bacteria and packaging materials are not a minor irritant to a system like that. They are a rupture.

The principle behind "Leave No Trace" has a history worth knowing. As outdoor recreation expanded during the 1960s and '70s, land management agencies began promoting responsible recreation through educational campaigns. The U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management developed shared guidelines, and in the late 1980s the Forest Service partnered with the National Outdoor Leadership School to build a formal curriculum. Leave No Trace became an independent nonprofit in 1994. It took decades to turn common sense into institutional infrastructure.

Waste introduced into natural environments disrupts more than scenery. Animals that consume discarded food adjust their behavior in ways that can prove catastrophic. Birds and fish that mistake plastic for food fill their stomachs with material they cannot digest. In ocean environments, plastic bags and metal cans may take centuries to millennia to break down.

The Carlsbad cave did not evolve alongside Cheetos. It evolved over millions of years in the absence of them. The bag is gone now. The disruption has a longer timeline.

Read the full story at National Geographic, September 18, 2024

Hot Take: The geological record has survived mass extinctions, supervolcanic events and magnetic pole reversals. It was not prepared for Cheetos.