A significant amount of carbon-14 was added to the atmosphere from nuclear weapons testing. Since it has a half-life of about 5,000 years, most of it is still around. (The rest of it comes from cosmic rays smashing into atmospheric nitrogen.)
Granted, that's an isotope of a well-known element, not one of the "extra elements tacked to the end of the periodic table". I can point out that [tiny traces of plutonium-244 have been found in the ocean seafloor](https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996499035/freshly-made-pluton...). That has a half-life of about 80 million years; it's probably the result of ejecta from a supernova washing over the Earth several million years ago.
Comments
Don't those decay immediately? They would account for 0% of the earth.
A significant amount of carbon-14 was added to the atmosphere from nuclear weapons testing. Since it has a half-life of about 5,000 years, most of it is still around. (The rest of it comes from cosmic rays smashing into atmospheric nitrogen.)
Granted, that's an isotope of a well-known element, not one of the "extra elements tacked to the end of the periodic table". I can point out that [tiny traces of plutonium-244 have been found in the ocean seafloor](https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996499035/freshly-made-pluton...). That has a half-life of about 80 million years; it's probably the result of ejecta from a supernova washing over the Earth several million years ago.
Not all of them .. and some of the material made in nuclear labs is new to earth and not sourced from space but identical to material that is.
There are a lot of isotopes.