The Anthropocene - with Jan Zalasiewicz and Christian Schwägerl

thank you very much ladies and gentlemen we are here to discuss to listen to about the point in time and which homo sapiens has stopped being influenced by his planet and there's no influencing the geology of our world I'm under the societal impact of fact I'll go to the very distinguished speakers here to talk about that we've got dr. sonic professor professor now isn't it yes yeah Chancellor Savage from Leicester University and he's going to talk about to begin with about the rocks I would've been you know who I was how's it going to the core as it were and we've got Christian who's written the book called the end throw the Anthropocene that's right to the to the point and you were interested more in the societal impact of of what's coming up so over to you okay thanks very much Robin and someone said we'll start with the rocks which is of course you know the earth up there and the the earth is is very old it's really very very old four and a half thousand million years you know and nobody not even ecologist can fit that amount of time and history and process and events into their heads what you're looking at there is four and a half thousand million years carefully neatly tabulated and ordered by due process of committee you know so it's all there you know the Cambrian and the Carboniferous which are us it can apply to see them and all of that it's a way we can divide earth history into dynasties that we can more or less use as a common language and within that you know we're just at the very top left-hand side all of that so that's where we are and it's hierarchical so we live in in the phanerozoic a on we started about half million years ago and creepy-crawlies came around within that within us whose era that's dinosaurs kicked the bucket at that time and mammals you know took over 65 million years ago within that were in the quaternary period the period of the the the Ice Ages north and south the last two and a half million years and within that that is divided to two epochs most of it the ice ages of the Pleistocene you also have the Holocene which is the last interglacial the earth warmed up about eleven a half thousand years ago and George is separated that off because it makes our landscape you know it's it's it's a nice handy unit to have even though it's very short at eleven thousand years of course why we're here the question is have we moved into something completely different you know have we not just changed history and and you know politics and the environment uh some have we changed geology fundamentally and it's an idea that's been around for really quite a long time you know if you look at trace the early ancestors if you like the idea then this man looks at the comp to perform you know in 1778 wrote a book called they sleep oak Dillon ature the epochs of nature within that he had seven epochs it was a first scientifically based of history a total length of time he said seventy-five thousand years and even that for him was scarily long but he had his seventh epoch within that logical a person still on a second day sold another tool when the power of man of humans assisted that of nature and and the idea sort of came in and out of geology after that mainly out because geologists basically said nonsense you know as they realized the earth was very big and very very old and very powerful and oceans open and closed and mountain ranges grew up and were rolled it down you had enormous volcanic outbursts and meteorite strikes how could humans do anything on that kind of scale well it became realized in the last couple of deck it's that humans in fact could do things on that scale and the idea was really crystallized by by this man Paul Crutzen he's not a geologist more sensible than that isn't atmospheric chemist and he won a Nobel Prize for his work on the ozone layer he also worked with the likes of Carl Sagan on nuclear winter ideas and so on very one of the world's most respected scientists and he a meeting about a little under 20 years ago people have talked about the Holocene and he said stop you know we're not in the Holocene we're in the Anthropocene and he published the term to say that you know the Holocene had stopped his hypothesis and that the Anthropocene had started and really that's scientists geologists been playing with idea working on that idea testing it out really ever since and a few the geologists were very late as ever very late to the party and they were reacting to events and I was part of a group of the George Boole Society of London just down the road we had a meeting in a room not quite as grand as this but but still pretty nice with free wine I remember where we discussed this idea that had this name that was being used as if it was real but was not real not formal not part of the geological time scale but part of that list could it be formal could it be real and our answer cautiously was well it might be we're very cautious about this the evidence seems to show that there's something real behind that so the last five or six years I've been part of a group of scientists looking at the evidence to see whether the Anthropocene could be geologically real and formally bureaucratically a real as well which is a much greater thing in in in geology so what is it where should it start and people have suggested the Anthropocene might start anything from over 10,000 years ago to the still be in the future this is the current leader of the pack for the contenders the great acceleration the post-war boom in everything in oil and gas and coal in nuclear in technology in agriculture in biological effects so roughly mid 20th century so a number of us you know were born before the Anthropocene started in in that case that is a formal definition history of course goes on and is complicated we have to find you know a boundary so what is the evidence what is the rock evidence for the Anthropocene well minerals humans we without realizing it we make all kinds of new minerals we separate out metals but make sure doesn't like doing that humans do that very very well so for instance we have collectively you know separated out about 500 million tons of aluminium again mostly since the mid-twentieth sanctuary enough to coat the whole of the USA and a bit of Canada in aluminium foil you may may not decide that's a good idea or not your ballpoint pen has probably a tip of tungsten carbide another new mineral and again there are lots of these we don't know how many a thousands at least you know we are making a new mineral epoch if not mineral era in in that the total number of natural minerals is only just over four thousand and most of those are vanishingly rare other ones mineraloid who cut the plastic these are the greenhouses of Almeria in spain this is what happens to them and they get scattered all around the world 6 billion tons about of plastics we've made enough to coat the whole earthen clingfilm most of it not recycled minerals make rocks and this is a again rock of course that the rock of all seasons concrete that is about 500 billion terms enough for a kilo every square kilometer sorry every square meter of the Earth's surface and it goes and we make lots of it bricks a trillion Brits a year at the moment lots of that and and of course rocks makes charter and we make again lots of strata we make build-up strata we make negative strata holes in the ground we map geologists map the strata my colleagues at the British Geological Survey are making maps of human-made strata that's London that's not we're probably on there somewhere we go deeper to the ground by far than any animal I think the record is the Nile crocodile we worked out about 12 meters made mr. Bates that is that gold mine there is over three kilometers underground in in South Africa and these are both holes of course which can go again many kilometers up to 10 I think 12 is the the record but commonly 7 8 9 10 kilometers underground this is the little things truck there's a road as a crater beneath that crater there was a nuclear bomb and it made a bit of a mess it is the we are the only biological organisms to make igneous plutons underground chemistry challenge is called chemo stratigraphy and of course you know this is you know and and and Robin and his colleagues have written much about this we are changing the Earth's chemistry it is rather easy to change Earth's climate surface chemistry because we have less atmosphere this is a lovely diagram drawing work of art by the artist Adam Nieman that's all the air we have out there the DVD all the atmosphere we have scarily that little marble rolling about up there all the water we have the on earth all the oceans the rivers the lakes the ice caps the groundwater that's all we have so it's easy to change its composition as we are doing we know important things about past fossil air there's fossil air there that's probably a few hundred thousand years old in that chunk of ice pulled out from deep under Antarctica and that is four hundred thousand years of carbon dioxide going up and down and up and down and then finally on the right hand side they're going up well beyond anything in the last two million years at least and what it's doing and this is a little diagram a very recent diagram just published a couple of months ago that red used to know Antarctica is a sign of water freshening because so much ice is melting it's about somewhere between two and four hundred billion tons of ice is melting every year that's about 50 tons each for each of us every year and sea level is beginning just beginning to creep up because of that another thing we've altered carbon there's nitrogen again since since the mid 20th century we have doubled the size of reactive nitrogen at the Earth's surface probably the biggest change in the nitrogen cycle it has been said by a respected show chemist for two and a half billion years which is quite something and of course a nuclear signal environmentally trivial so far but a wonderful marker we're all all of us and everything on earth again since 1945 since our gordo have plutonium and cesium admiration you know almost detective Lee honest and on the floor here you know on the in this glass of water fossils well here's a fossil it's a fossil a trail of some creepy crawly it's about half a billion years old there's our equivalent to footprint this is one of my favorite fossils it's it's a fossil wasps nest from the island of tenerife it's about a million years old this is our equivalent we're living in it at the moment and this is of course where we are we're it's possible it's a trace fossil it is wonderfully geological it's made of a rock steel and what all of it will fossilize you know given a half a chance and then another one this is a trace fossil system called Shanghai which just goes on and on and on for thousands no of square kilometers and of course 3% of the world's land surface it's like this is a very complicated trace fossil and of course we have usual fossils as well meet Jane Jane is at last University's Tyrannosaurus an adolescent teenage term asaurus and of course we use other fossils to give us a history of life on Earth that is again you're looking I apologize to the speed at half a billion years of life's ups and downs radiations and extinction events when it goes down there have been five big mass extinction events are we in another one at the moment well we've had extinctions there's a poor dodo dynasty nepeta sought a name to hang on to a creature insult to injury that's youngster dolphin a photograph to probably know extinct the the Costa Rican golden toad discovered name 1964 extinct in the 1990s sometime so do we have another mass extinction event this is something that our colleague Tony barnosky the University of California has been looking at with his colleagues his answer is not yet but there are many many many creatures on the edge between 20 and 50 percent of species in many groups are in endangered or critically endangered so he said give us another couple of hundred years of business as usual we will have the sixth major mass extinction event so it's not for certain yet and it can be put off but it's heading in that direction this is something that has happened this is something quite new in Earth history the invaders rabbits my cat controlling the ecology meets Mimi she she really runs our back garden with an iron poor rats of course everywhere around the earth the this is the the zebra mussel originally from a small part of Russia and now doing very very well and taken over the United States of America just about something that polyp you were never manage to do in its time and so we have carried wittingly or unwittingly creatures around from between every continent and every ocean on earth that is new that level of invasion has not been seen for the three plus billion years of life on earth and so in many parts of the world invasives outnumber native species and a numerically dominant and of course part of that is because of us that a lot of us if you take land vertebrates moderately to large size land vertebrates we make up a third now instead of three fifty species with you know that is the the if you like the long term baseline average with much attention distributed between them we're now down to 180 species of those we want make up one third the creatures we keep to eat the cows the biggest see the sheep the goats they make up most of the rest of the two-thirds all the wild things the the Rhino sorry the cheetahs the Lions make up less than 5% for the less than 3% so again this is a quite novel departure you know so it is quite something of a future fossil record we've got and our machines what we are now calling our techno fossils part of the Technosphere which we depend on which surrounds us because all around us here are it's an order of magnitude or two larger than that so that if you like it's a case for prosecution the geological you know the Anthropocene is rocks if you like and we still have the question it is not yet formally decided you know we as a group were meant to give our recommendations next year it will be a tall order there's a lot of complicated evidence out there and reach ologists are not used to working quickly you know you know I'm like journalists who have to work quickly all the time we're usually very slow about things nonetheless it's it's the idea is clearly out there the Nobel laureates a couple of years ago in Stockholm used it you know as a defining concept to try and understand what is happening to the world nature did an editorial a couple of years ago again suggesting that it is useful to have this again to keep ourselves in a long term perspective so have we really broken through into something quite new in Earth history so again it would be a wonderful question to discuss for the next hour or so I'll leave you with an anthropology contrail affair in the sky so thank you for your attention to all this rock stuff and I shall pass over to Christian thanks well good evening and thanks Yan for this wonderful introduction to the Anthropocene paving the way into this new geological epoch and which really brings up a lot of very hard but also wonderful questions for us it's a great honor to be here I was kind of looking forward to touching that desk that normally sits here but I think it obviously found a better place to live and I think it's quite good actually because their desk kind of radiated an atmosphere a sort of authoritative atmosphere where as icing the Anthropocene is a very open concept that needs a lot of open debate and brings up so many open questions that really need us all to think about it and not of course in geology there is an authoritative voice that will say yes and no but then what do we do with it so I want to continue we're young kind of stopped and this is a very personal interpretation of the Anthropocene and I think we will have millions of personal interpretations of this phenomenon and we need them so here you have the geology and young wonderfully described it looks like very orderly like almost like skyscrapers or something but the Anthropocene really is always the rocks of course the long history of Earth but it is human consciousness that comes into the game of Earth's history it's the number of humans rising or falling that affects it it's this great acceleration made up of a lot of factors like technology like energy use like values in our societies that come in like money flows a lot of factors that come in influence what ultimately then will become the Anthropocene because it's an emerging phenomenon it's not something that's kind of sitting there mano monolithically like one of these fantastic rocks but it's something evolving and so it's an an open thing I have tried to interpret this as a journalist it was my experience as a reporter but increasingly I feel I'm approaching it just really as a citizen of planet planet Earth the book I've written has inspired in its German edition a couple of projects at the house of world cultures in Berlin running for the past three years I like an intellectual festival where we brought together scientists from really different fields like geologists and psychologists to examine how does the human psyche affect the geology of the future and we played that out in different formats including as you can see here the guy who is in a very funny posture with form we had a naked man on stage during that festival which was really interested he was a robot an ape and an artist at the same time trying to impersonate that and the dog I think and we have an exhibition ongoing if you come to Munich at the German Technology Museum about the Anthropocene you see D Paul Crutzen here in on the image and Achim Steiner the head of the United Nations Environment Program who opened the exhibition so please if you do come to Munich visit the exhibition it is the first in the world to really try and explore the phenomenon from from many different angles and this is one example of what is shown there it's a hypothetical fossil of the future a piece of plastic fossil perhaps that will be found by a young of the deep future now I have come a lot of cross a lot of critical questions about the Anthropocene and I think that's good it needs critical debate it is an on the one hand it is a scientific hypothesis but then it has effects it makes people think it makes people it provokes people and people for example think it might be anthropocentric people think it might become a vector of human entitlement like now we are the masters of planet Earth and we own it and we can run it and we can engineer it it's ours is that perhaps the meaning or people say that it is too abstract a few it's like you know it's not in Earth's it's like so far away from from it in a sense like the the the biggest picture you can take far away from our lives and then there is this idea that the Anthropocene is the sum of all environmental havoc and if it was dead then really perhaps society should try and fight it because would we want to live in a nightmare for the next 10,000 years if that is what the Anthropocene is so my big question which I'd try to explore is is there something a way towards a better geological record we will do we will create our footsteps will be there but can we create more beautiful footsteps Li and leave behind more beautiful footsteps the Anthropocene idea sings helps us was said by redefining our sense of time because we live in a very short-term world with a very short term economy where managers are valued by what they do for the next day or week and the nanosecond trading we have is the symbol of today's economy and then on the one on the other hand we have the apocalyptic thinking in the environmental movement so we are kind of bouncing between nanosecond trading and end-of-the-world thinking now the Anthropocene creates something like a long now idea it creates a deep future this means it's a geological epoch it puts us on the scale of Earth's history other cultures like Hindu culture already was able to think long term for a long time like the one year for Brahma is 3 billion years on on earth and Western culture is kind of catching up with developing now a more long-term approach to our lives and the Anthropocene is helping us with it creating a sense of a beginning now and wonderfully describe the spread of cities and if you look at the spread the protected spread of cities you will have cities in the future that our thousand kilometers long now this was Paris here in the cities of the future and best West Africa or along the Chinese coast might be a thousand kilometers long so what is in that for me as an answer opposite message is that these cities will be nature they will act like nature because they are the dominant phenomenon around so they will have to act like nature or one could say they will have to sink like a planet as marina Alberti has put it which means cities have to become something like ecosystems this is an impressive image but not yet where I would like it to be this is I think in Florida and the green you see is girls golf courses I'd love this to be bogs that capture the co2 we produce and I love cycling highways going through there I love new wetlands being created there wild spaces open social spaces where kids can meet wildlife so this is an idea for London I don't know if you like it or not but I think a strategy to reshape our cities in a sustainable way is important because the cities will be nature likewise with agriculture we are used to extract our food from the soil but in the future the agricultural areas already we have changed 75 percent of the planet surface so the agricultural areas they are the new nature so we have to run agriculture like a ecosystem that we can live from for a long time you see burning rainforest here that's where the soy gets grown that feeds the beef you eat probably so an island so this is a big call to develop a new kind of agriculture not like this this is where all the nitrogen goes that you spoke about it's a pig farm in the US so in the future you should develop genetic highways for example that run through our cultural landscape and I think modern technology with GPS driven tractors allows for that because they can go around that now the Technosphere needs to become part of the biosphere and become in a way compostable so today it's kind of this Anthropocene thing that the larger the pile of rubble you leave behind the larger you are in the historical record perhaps we can become a little bit more invisible in the geological record like the negative strata you talked about in perhaps that might be an answer for scene signal to the future not leaving behind plastic but making the plastic so valuable that you don't want to throw it away or invent new types of plastic that will dissolve in the ocean was in a short time without leaving toxic chemicals around the Technosphere becoming part of the biosphere I don't know if this is the right way it's a military car that's been developed in the United States company just been bought by Google so if you meet a cow like that out in the countryside you know it's a it's a Google cow but perhaps it will collect environmental data in the future and be a good good thing another interpreting challenge is to develop a sharing economy and I don't mean Boober and I don't mean Airbnb I mean that we have to start multiplying thinking that we have to multiply our lives that our Western lifestyle by 7 billion people and is that the lifestyle that is kind of global Liza ballif you want to call it like that the sharing economy means that we allow enough space for other people to develop their own lifestyles becoming energy smart is another Anthropocene challenge with global warming now taking off and efficiency can do only so in so much.now the Sheep looks very interesting and it's surely very efficient as the company claims I see this cliff behind there so and if that stumbles then that you know will be an interesting sequel to that advertisement so I think even if you don't like wind farms and other forms of renewable energy we've been ignorant about this question for so long that perhaps that's the price we have to pay to get out of fossil fuels and the International Energy Agency has identified a gap of 100 billion US dollars annually on energy research now this is a fusion reactor for example that could solve our energy crises but it costs money to do these things and there is too little spent on on energy research Anthropocene challenge number seven for me is to become more conscious about directed evolution because we are not just diminishing biodiversity we are also increasing it and increasing it with amazing creatures we live from and we live with and even synthetic creatures that still live in the laboratory but might one day be released this is what craig Venter has done his or her name is Cynthia it's a microbe that has been put together molecule by molecule in the lab that just reflects the amazing power we have and becoming more conscious about that power I think is really important for me the Anthropocene is not anthropocentric because it makes us aware how deeply rooted we are in the earth system in a way it breaks up that long-held barrier between nature and culture and nature becomes culture in a sense and thereby culture becomes nature in the Anthropocene and that meant that makes us feel also through the crises we will go through and already go through how deeply connected we are so the Anthropocene is a vector not to make us more centered on ourselves but make us more open to connect with the other life-forms who share this planet with these are my two kids and surely I'm trying to make sure that they connect with the oceans for example not only in the local shopping mall now anthropocene challenge number nine and I have 12 I'm finishing soon is to make our economy a subset of ecology we act as if nature was something the environment was something we can take in for free and put in our waste after we use things that's the Holocene for me the Holocene for me is the era where we had all this for granted and where this big environment was around us where we could extract things from and put our waste into but this doesn't work anymore everything now comes back and the environment in a sense becomes the environment that's what we what we shape so is it really good that a living rainforest has no value in the books of the city or of the frankfurt stock market 0 as long as it's living providing us with pharmaceuticals with fresh water and everything it's it's value is zero so I think we need to find ways it's a very controversial subject but find ways to factor the value of nature into our economy and realize that really what we call the economy is a part of ecology so economists call nature and externality that's really weird I think for me these people live on a different planet now I call this a central bank and you all know this I think this is a really important and we might face some situations with climate change where Kew Gardens is more important to us then a lot of the algorithmically produced money you have in Frankfurt or in the inner city here because there the seeds are kept that might nourish us in the future now this is a table at my home I think Anthropocene challenges really that we link our lives to this big idea the Anthropocene is not something that's you know just somewhere in academia it's something that we do every day we are Anthropocene practitioners when we eat when we decide whether to cycle or drive a car and you can see I have this little planet in the back there it's a talking planet so if you put a pen to it it will tell you something about the countries or the languages and in the future perhaps there's a planet that will tell us what the food we eat dust to itself and I think this linking of our lifestyles to the Anthropocene needs some more cultural practices this is Bali where people make offerings and to make sure that you know everything's all right in balance was nature so when I came back I started looking at my wife's bin as a kind of offering I give to Planet Earth every day and I felt really bad so I think we need kind of more new cultural practices that reflect that sort of thinking and it's a call for action the Anthropocene and participate in activities like the climate March now my vision for the Anthropocene would be that we the internet grows far beyond what it's now it's now becoming more of a commercial thing and I think we should try and direct it towards an Internet that's we now talk about the Internet of Things but what are these things are they fridges and cars and commercial products or are the things we want to have in our internet the living beings we we share planet Earth with so you see here the net of network of sensors and vironment the sensors already building up around the globe I think that's fantastic and perhaps in the future the internet will become something that is like the planetary nervous system and one thing I find really important is that we take that what we call materialism more seriously I think we need to become more materialistic because if you very much you're realistic we wouldn't throw everything away so this is an artwork that is in a wonderful gallery very close here in the October gallery and it is made from metal bottle caps and it just shows what wonderful things you can do with material you consider to be worthless so really become part of the material cycles young describe is really important and to feel that in an age where this plant will be composed and it's a plant from the tropical rainforest this a this plant will be composed of carbon atoms that have gone through your life it's in the middle of the rainforest but the atoms of carbon that you produced and I produced when we drive a car we'll make up that plant and likewise the nature the stuff we put out into nature becomes nature this is a glass beach where a dump was where old glass bottles were put and they've become this wonderful Beach - I think there's a positive aspect to that most importantly I think the Anthropocene really needs to be something that is for everybody and that's what I call the Anthropocene democracy something where you start viewing the planet planets development from the point of view of the weakest I think we do wonderful things we build machines that can simulate the Big Bang we can create flowers on the level of nano measures or something that looks like flowers and we can send astronauts in space who then are so happy to get a tomato sent up that they tweet back how wonderful it is to have this fresh tomato up in space so if we can do all this I think that we can go towards a better geological record and and we can all be part of this so you're going to enter the Anthropocene is a process that reflects about itself and I can't say whether we will be really entering a fabulous and sharp asinus this artist implies here but I think it doesn't have to be just the sum of all environmental problems so thank you very much thank you very much Christian well I've got to congratulate wolf speakers both from sport West and I asked them to which means I've got to speak more a bit so I'm not so sure that was a good thing it was interesting that you had a picture there of the Large Hadron Collider which most people think is the the greatest experiment on earth but really it's nothing compared to the experiment that we are now doing to our planet that's the really the great experiment they are all the different ways that you have described it all the things that were putting out there You've we were both definitive I'm provocative and I would open the questions out in ten minutes but I've one little slightly trivial question and I want I've put two most gentlemen when do we actually think the Anthropocene began what is it anybody got a favorite date and a favorite place that they would like to do it now I say this because I'm a Glaswegian you might spotted that and I I was born very near Glasgow Green and in middle of Glasgow Green there's a large boulder in which is inscribed roughly speaking it was around this spot that James Watt while wandering through Glasgow Green conceived of the idea of the secondary condenser for a steam engine and I'm in Tina that's the spot you can actually say that's where it all began because that triggered the Industrial Revolution now that's my bed over to you and you get your shot suspended and if anybody in the audience who's got paid a favourite show too much yeah it's a lovely idea and it's sure you know it clearly is one of the you know the the great historical turning points you know where where the history of life went down you know a different crowds legs and worth gone down if that hadn't happened you know the earth would be different you know so that's certainly if you look at it historically then we look for these key moments in geologists with we're not quite as subtle as that we look at rock we look it's Charter and of course part of what is we're dividing they're thrombus we're not just dividing history and in fact we're not primarily just dividing history we're dividing rock strata when we think about the Carboniferous in the Jurassic it is a rocks which have within them all the evidence of everything that happened in that time so in fact we have a dual time scale it's a parallel time scale of rock strata and of time of normal time but lots of it so the way we typically divide time and these are our visions arbitrary but meant to capture the natural if you like dynasties of time so I think the one I would put in I'd like to go well into the past but in the future as it were the rocks I look at for a trade you know what my craft is rocks of mid-wales very rainy very wet very green lots of sheep and bears so so I'm afraid where the rocks are about half a billion years old four hundred five hundred million years old and they represent a kind of seafloor which we don't really have on earth today - seafloor which had little oxygen it was morally stagnant so this charter piled up the layers of mud piled up year by year by year and there are wonderful archive if you compare that to modern sea floors one sea floors have creepy crawlies lots of oxygen and so they chewed through we it takes history and chews it up literally you know so it puts it you know through if like a food blender but there are one or two places on the sea floor where we go back into the Silurian and the Ordovician and there's one of those off the coast of california something called a santa barbara basin it's a little hole in sea floor and oxygen doesn't get in so the layers of mud pile up one on top of the other on top of the other on top of the other and I've been doing that for about 2,000 years and you can put out pull out fish scales from those layers compare that with fisheries caches and things like that one of the things we're doing we hope to do you know for the fun part of our formal thing is to look get cause of those ancient but modern layers and look for that for the history of the earth year by year layer by year and to see when within that we we can see layers we can we can say ah there there is either plutonium or plastic you know or some kind of fish scale which will tell us we've got a nice marker we can follow around so that would be my suggestion and it's something we have yet to see how it would work out so that's a suggestion of where to loot bellows and yes yes yes yeah we're okay I need young something first can one put these things into a hotel room would that be possible of course yeah how would it look like is it like a golden something or well it would be a cool it would be you know the things you do it's a layers of mud it's it's a but I guess it's about the size of London you know there's this hole in the sea floor it's it's surrounded by walls and all sides oxygen doesn't get in and you were simply to get to it you you you have to lower a big box box goes into the mud if you're lucky when you lift the box up it has all the layers of mud you can take that to a hotel room or somewhere else okay and pick the layers of mud apart yes well because I would suggest that the hotel room really where Paul Crutzen had the suggested the idea of the Anthropocene right would be a really good thing because it's exactly what you're gonna hadn't said that the Anthropocene is a process that becomes aware of itself and that reflects upon itself and Paul Crutzen idea and it was also of course the word was already around Eugene's term I had already used it but pockets and congenial II kind of conceived it and and used it there and from there it made its history so that would be a good thing to repair I mean the glass beach I don't know how much people were taking minutes you liked it mmm if people were taking minutes yeah meeting that you would have the first word the Anthropocene is actually down as a material record geologists like material okay so we can name down the paper in I don't know if the hotel manager were like that date that's in February 2002 so that so you would actually be good meaning very recent I mean of course the geologists look for hardcore physical evidence and with the nuclear blast for example that are now debated as a starting point that would be of course something very hard but I kind of feel we should really perhaps there should be like a global competition for that and you started it now which is really which is really great there should be a global competition because we should think beyond nuclear blasts as a symbol of ourselves and perhaps the glass beach here waste turning into something so beautiful people now go there actually it's a nature reserve now and people now go there and pick these things so they now talk about replenishing it actually was all bottles in a nature reserve so that actually is a very good symbol we've been pretty lucky their waste has turned into something so beautiful is the British Geological Society in its considerations about the proper scene is it actually considering that aspect of how old it is or is it really that doesn't matter it's whether it exists or not well two things one is it real does it exist you know it has the will changed you know from a state to no geological state now to one before if it has need a boundary yes and that boundary is a partly arbitrary and usually meant to be practical so you can find it in rocks so it's you can see something or detect something or feel something and again if we take the mid twentieth century we're in support for choice you know we have we have plastics bit of an all plastic so that time we have that aluminium you know which is was coating us of a we have a whole range of techno fossils of different sorts by rows or point pens yes for instance you know which you know if you like archaeologists love these ideas because they're very tangible they go and dig in the ground and they find very old stuff and they can tell they're very old stuff from the young stuff because of of these physical traces in the ground you're both very recent I remember allopathy this origin that's a big change that is a big change and there are people who say the Anthropocene has started much earlier yes almost like some I think say is it five six thousand years ago yeah but I mean what it really needs for something to be happening on on that scale it needs to be global it needs to be a long-term and it needs to be measurable for for a long long time so I think the effects like rice farming 5,000 years ago had effects on the climate through me same production but very small ones and so in order to be a global and long-term thing and a very powerful thing I think it needs to start later yeah I mean if you wanted to demonstrate to me that the mid-twentieth sanctuary what is it then we would have to take I think Chris John's book here and take put it like this and this is time going from here to here and so let's say when when you can see the page is just slightly bent up here so farming started here and it's spread over thousands of years from one place to another and the world changed very very slowly and then it began to go up a little bit you know we'd have to learn the big hit the industry revolution but the mid-twentieth sanctuary all the parameters started going up it's a cliff it's an environmental cliff you know which is why you know both in terms of the history and in terms of these practical markers you know it is turning out of the leading candidate you know for that so something around that that simply works you know that that we can use a service you know as as a practical boundary well I think you got Glasgow off the hook there I just wonder how far the Anthropocene extends considering the fact that man's landed on the moon we've sent probes to various planets and and comets so is it restricted purely to earth or is it wherever mankind has touched in the solar system

Channel: The Royal Institution

Views: 15,044

Keywords: Anthropocene, science, Ri, Jan Zalasiewicz, holocene, human impact, planet, palaeobiology, Human era, Geology (Field Of Study), Christian Schwägerl

Id: xP9P2i5jx-4

Length: 49min 39sec (2979 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2015