Deep Time and Geologic Ages.
Geologists measure time in eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages, with eons being the largest unit of time and ages being the smallest. No unit is uniform in size, but is rather determined by complex multiple factors, including geographic layers (stratigraphy), chemical composition, radiometrics, and fossil evidence. The age of rocks would not be interesting in the absence of fossils indicative of life that inhabited and later examined those rocks. Culturally modern, i.e., cave-painting/burying-the-dead, humans are around 50,000 years old. The Holocene epoch, our current relatively warm inter-glacial epoch, began around 12,000 years ago, at about the time that humans began playing with agriculture in the Middle East & China, which led to our current ability to live in large groups with a division of labor and resulting expertise to support such large groups. In geologic time, we’ve only just begun. Too bad it's over already.
Although humans can conceptualize deep time, and measure it, we are not adapted to actually think with extended time horizons, which is why the world changed before we knew it, before we understood what change really even meant. Around 1800, the approximate date of the invention of the steam engine, the world changed. Profoundly. Once again, for the sixth time. Sir Charles Lyell was a toddler, and had yet to understand the meaning in layer upon layer of rock formations, although eventually, the subtitle of his book on The Principles of Geology would be presciently astute:
An Attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth's surface by reference to causes now in operation
The present is key to the past. And vice versa.
At the time of the steam engine, Charles Darwin was not even yet conceived, and could obviously have no conception of deep time, the blows of chance, the shocks of time, and the attendant earthshaking, telluric forces on the radiations of the species, including humankind, who are barely the last page in the 4.6 billion year book of Earth, a fucking footnote, at best, that brought an end to perhaps not only itself as a species, but all of life itself. Now you get an exact feeling for what it is like to be George Bush. Pity us, the fool. I generally take these collective facts as a bad, bad omen, a constellation of factual events that is a distinctive sign-post that we, as humans, despite our large brains and ability to predict and foresee the future with some accuracy, are psychologically out of touch and control, and cannot rein ourselves in. Rap your mind around it, and embrace your inner George W. Bush.
Welcome to the Anthropocene: Age of the Orks?
Earlier this century, not very long at all after Darwin and Lyell made their seminal (and still incredible to some) observations about deep time, others noticed the human-caused (anthropogenic) changes in the Earth.
In 2000 and 2002, Nobel-winning chemist Paul Crutzen suggested in the most highly regarded science journal in existence, Nature, a name for this new human-dominated epoch or age:
For the past three centuries, the effects of humans on the global environment have escalated. Because of these anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, global climate may depart significantly from natural behaviour for many millennia to come. It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene — the warm period of the past 10–12 millennia. The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane. This date also happens to coincide with James Watt’s design of the steam engine in 1784.
Mankind’s growing influence on the environment was recognized as long ago as 1873, when the Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani spoke about a "new telluric force which in power and universality may be compared to the greater forces of earth," referring to the "anthropozoic era". And in 1926, V. I. Vernadsky acknowledged the increasing impact of mankind: "The direction in which the processes of evolution must proceed, namely towards increasing consciousness and thought, and forms having greater and greater influence on their surroundings." Teilhard de Chardin and Vernadsky used the term ‘noösphere’ — the ‘world of thought’ — to mark the growing role of human brain-power in shaping its own future and environment.
Recently, twenty-one researchers from the Geological Society of London published a paper in GSA Today examining Crutzen’s proposal that we have entered a new epoch vividly captured by the name "The Anthropocene."
This modified figure shows several features of the planet that have been characteristic of the Holocene. First, as the inter-glacial period warmed, sea levels increased with melting ice prior to leveling off for the past 8,000 years. Second, atmospheric carbon dioxide remained fairly static throughout the Holocene until a recent dramatic spike in the past few decades, corresponding to dramatic spikes in human population and rates of deforestation over the past several hundred years.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the global human population was some 300 million at A.D. 1000, 500 million at A.D. 1500, and 790 million by A.D. 1750 (United Nations, 1999), and exploitation of energy was limited mostly to firewood and muscle power. Evidence recorded in Holocene strata indicates increasing levels of human influence, though human remains and artifacts are mostly rare. Stratigraphic signals from the mid-part of the epoch in areas settled by humans are predominantly biotic (pollen of weeds and cultivars following land clearance for agriculture) with more ambiguous sedimentary signals (such as sediment pulses from deforested regions). Atmospheric lead pollution is registered in polar ice caps and peat bog deposits from Greco-Roman times onward (Dunlap et al., 1999; Paula and Geraldes, 2003), and it has been argued that the early to mid-Holocene increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from ~260–280 ppm, a factor in the climatic warmth of this interval, resulted from forest clearance by humans (Ruddiman, 2003). Human activity then may help characterize Holocene strata, but it did not create new, global environmental conditions that could translate into a fundamentally different stratigraphic signal. From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the present day, global human population has climbed rapidly from under a billion to its current 6.5 billion (Fig. 1), and it continues to rise. The exploitation of coal, oil, and gas in particular has enabled planet-wide industrialization, construction, and mass transport, the ensuing changes encompassing a wide variety of phenomena...
From a geological perspective of deep time, and largely without comment on the ramifications for human existence, they concluded that human influence on the Holocene climate and environment, in terms of changes in physical sedimentation, carbon cycle and temperature perturbations, ocean and biotic change are sufficiently grand to support Crutzen’s proposal that the Holocene Elvis has left the building.
We consider it most reasonable for this new unit to be considered at epoch level. It is true that the long-term consequences of anthropogenic change might be of sufficient magnitude to precipitate the return of "Tertiary" levels of ice volume, sea level, and global temperature that may then persist over several eccentricity (100 k.y.) cycles (e.g., Tyrrell et al., 2007). This, especially in combination with a major extinction event, would effectively bring the Quaternary period to an end. However, given the large uncertainties in the future trajectory of climate and biodiversity, and the large and currently unpredictable action of feedbacks in the earth system, we prefer to remain conservative. Thus, while there is strong evidence to suggest that we are no longer living in the Holocene (as regards the processes affecting the production and character of contemporary strata), it is too early to state whether or not the Quaternary has come to an end.
Well, thank goodness we didn't fuck up the entire Quaternary! Yet...
We Don’t Need No Stinking "Global Stratotype Section & Point"
After informally proclaiming the end of the Holocene, there are only technical issues in deciding what many geologic or temporal markers or signals to select from for the purposes of identifying the beginning of the new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. CO2 levels in ice? Radioactive isotopes in the stratigraphy from the era of atom bomb testing? The eruption of Mount Tambora that caused a year without summer, markedly and adversely affecting tree growth? There’s no urgent need to deal with those niggling details.
In the case of the Anthropocene, however, it is not clear that—for current practical purposes—a GSSP is immediately necessary. At the level of resolution sought, and at this temporal distance, it may be that simply selecting a numerical age (say the beginning of 1800) may be an equally effective practical measure. This would allow (for the present and near future) simple and unambiguous correlation of the stratigraphical and historical records and give consistent utility and meaning to this as yet informal (but increasingly used) term.
What remains truly urgent, yet NEVER uttered in the ruling classes who have proven themselves time and again incapable of thinking beyond their puny selves, is that we have to stop ourselves from ending the entire fucking Quaternary. I think that's a reasonably modest political goal.
The Sixth Extinction
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/...
The Sixth Extinction can be characterized as the first recorded global extinction event that has a biotic, rather than a physical, cause, due to massive asteroid impact, volcanic eruptions. Yet, looking deeper, human impact on the planet is a (sic) similar to the Cretaceous cometary collision. Sixty-five million years ago that extraterrestrial impact -- through its sheer explosive power, followed immediately by its injections of so much debris into the upper reaches of the atmosphere that global temperatures plummeted and, most critically, photosynthesis was severely inhibited -- wreaked havoc on the living systems of Earth, which is precisely what we are doing to the planet right now...
Yet, upon further reflection, human impact on the planet is a direct analogue of the Cretaceous cometary collision. Sixty-five million years ago that extraterrestrial impact -- through its sheer explosive power, followed immediately by its injections of so much debris into the upper reaches of the atmosphere that global temperatures plummeted and, most critically, photosynthesis was severely inhibited -- wreaked havoc on the living systems of Earth. That is precisely what human beings are doing to the planet right now: humans are causing vast physical changes on the planet.
A recent analysis, published in the journal Nature, shows that it takes 10 million years before biological diversity even begins to approach what existed before a die-off. Over 10,000 scientists in the World Conservation Union have compiled data showing that currently 51 per cent of known reptiles, 52 per cent of known insects, and 73 per cent of known flowering plants are in danger along with many mammals, birds and amphibians. It is likely that some species will become extinct before they are even discovered, before any medicinal use or other important features can be assessed. The cliché movie plot where the cure for cancer is about to be annihilated is more real than anyone would like to imagine.
Research done by the American Museum of Natural History found that the vast majority of biologists believe that mass extinction poses a colossal threat to human existence, and is even more serious of an environmental problem than one of its contributors- global warming. The research also found that the average person woefully underestimates the dangers of mass extinction. Powerful industrial lobbies would like people to believe that we can survive while other species are quickly and quietly dying off. Irresponsible governments and businesses would have people believe that we don’t need a healthy planet to survive- even while human cancer rates are tripling every decade.
There have been five major mass extinction events on this planet over its entire history, over deep time. We humans have now marked and indeed have begun the Sixth Mass Extinction. We are losing species at such a rate, that to paraphrase Jared Diamond, we are essentially flying a jumbo jet while randomly and rapidly knocking out the rivets in mid-air. We don’t know the rate of rivet destruction, the value of specific rivets, or the length of the flight. In our ambitious greed to "get somewhere," in a blind reach for economic growth and progress we cannot grasp, we have built the jet, and for whatever complementary reasons and conflicts of interest, and have a ravening urge to knock out the rivets mid-flight.
There is little doubt left in the minds of professional biologists that Earth is currently faced with a mounting loss of species that threatens to rival the five great mass extinctions of the geological past, the most devastating being the Third major Extinction (c. 245 mya), the Permian, where 54% of the planet's species families lost. As long ago as 1993, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson estimated that Earth is currently losing something on the order of 30,000 species per year -- which breaks down to the even more daunting statistic of some three species per hour. Some biologists have begun to feel that this biodiversity crisis -- this "Sixth Extinction" -- is even more severe, and more imminent, than Wilson had supposed.
Thinking in The Long Now
Thinking in The Long Now refers to conceptualizing decision-making beyond the next quarterly profit margin, the next election, even beyond the scope of one’s own life, as if one’s decision-making were immortal. If we fail to learn how to do this robustly, quickly, and internationally, we are toast. Despite his own technical niggling about epochs versus ages, Andrew Alden gets to the crux of it:
http://geology.about.com/...
And [naming the new geologic age/epoch] would acknowledge the real point Crutzen is making:
An exciting, but also difficult and daunting task lies ahead of the global research and engineering community: to guide mankind towards global, sustainable, environmental management.
I would use the punchier formulation of Stewart Brand, the American visionary:
We are as gods and might as well get good at it.
Who knows? Once we have achieved global, sustainable environmental management we can start a new, post-Anthropocene age named the Planeteering.
