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So welcome to the Anthropocene,
or rather the talk about this possibly
up and coming epoch that we humans
created, started, initiated,
might be useful verbs here.
So I can thanks to the introduction, I
can skip a little bit about this, but I
do want to make it clear that I am not a
geologist myself.
I studied it a little bit during an
arrest semester, and if you're a student
and you have the chance to go on this you
program, I encourage you to absolutely
do it. That's one of the few programs
that definitely works for you.
You might have to take care of some
credit points before you go at your home
university, but do
it. And even if they don't accept some
thing from your guest university, it is
worth it.
So now I think a little crash course is
an order about Cronos stratigraphy.
So this is the science of
analyzing rock layers, assigning
ages and events in her earth
history to them.
And in this example, you can see a
so-called sea stack which is located
off the Irish coast.
And you notice that the rock layers,
they are differentiated by color
and by material, most
obviously.
And in this example,
you have several hundred million years of
geologic history.
If you've been lucky enough to visit the
Grand Canyon, once you have several
billion years of death
of the geologic record.
So as you walk down to the valley,
you cross the different strata,
these rock layers, and the deeper you go,
the older of these strata will be.
Now, how do they form
simplified they form
by any kind of material sinking
down through a water body like an ocean
or even just a lake to the
seafloor where they form sediments
and by a variety of processes
which essentially amount to
crystallization, the sediments
solidify into hard rock.
And then we have a stratum or in pleural
strata,
the type of material can be really
anything from sand to the biomass
of the organisms that
live in the water body.
And whenever something changes in Earth's
history, the sedimentation
might also change.
So stuff might sink faster, more
stuff might sink down or different types
of material, and therefore you get a new
layer, which you can distinguish.
And before I showed you some photos
of how the geologic record looks in real
life now we're going to have a look at
the textbook example.
This is the average consensus
international chronographs Crono
stratigraphic chart.
It shows you all the rock layers from
the past on the right hand to
basically now.
So, um, and this is not
the version number up here on in the
right corner.
When I submitted this talk in September,
it was still 2016 09.
So if you thought geologists are
working at a glacial pace, you're
actually right, because climate change
makes the glaciers move much faster as
well.
And we're going to focus now on the very
recent past.
You have here from left to right, the
hierarchy of geological time
units.
We are currently living in the period of
the quarter century and the epoch of
the Holocene.
And that one, you can see it on the right
there on the time scale started at
about eleven thousand seven hundred years
ago, which is the end of the last Ice
Age. And the epoch before that, the
Pleistocene was the EPA of
the switches of ice and warm ages.
And that's where we humans evolved.
That's where we come from.
And now we're living in the
Holocene.
The last important detail here in this
crash course are the so-called Speace.
Again, I'm simplifying a bit.
Just keep in mind it's the so-called
golden spikes.
And these are needed by the geologists
to define the boundary
layers between the strata so
they can, for example, in the case of the
Holocene, be a shift in deuterium
concentration in a particular ice core
from the Greenland ice sheet.
And there are different types of
methods to define them.
For example, chemical process,
chemical properties, physics,
physical properties, but also, as this
comic shows, the fossil record,
for example, here in the middle in the
green Mesozoic, that was basically
Jurassic Park. And, you know, that had to
close because an asteroid hit it.
And we find therefore, at the
upper layer of the Cretaceous period,
we find a lot of dinosaur fossils and
afterwards we find only mammal fossils.
And in between, we also find a chemical
signature that is iridium from
the asteroid.
So to summarize, please read this
yourself, I'm going to have a little
break.
It started out with a bit of stress for
me, so.
I think we're good.
So just please keep these three points
in mind for the next part of the
talk.
Now, we dove into the Anthropocene
discussion with the currently
running definition, and that is
that the Anthropocene is the present time
interval in which many geologically
significant conditions and processes
are profoundly altered by human
activities, which have a decisive
influence on the state dynamic and future
of the earth system conditions
and processes. We just covered a little
bit the human activities.
Well, you can guess what they are and I'm
going to talk about them a bit more.
And the state of mind dynamics, that is
the stuff you hear about in the news.
So climate change, the ice caps are
melting, the oceans are acidifying,
species going extinct.
And quite importantly, they are changes
in the global cycling of nutrients
for our plants, such as a phosphorus,
nitrogen and obviously carbon in the form
of carbon dioxide.
Um, what I do want to
argue is that these forces
are also what will shape the Anthropocene
and not, as you sometimes hear in
the popular press, that this is like our
age, we are in control of this planet
and so on, because influence is
definitely not the same thing as control.
I mean, we are quite influential on many
of the processes on this planet,
but we don't understand them completely.
And some of them will behave in ways
that we cannot predict on most of them.
Maybe also the Anthropocene is
currently just a concept that has been
popularized in 2000
and has been floating around a little bit
before that.
The guy here on the left, Mr. Crewdson,
he's a Nobel Prize winner
for his work on the ozone hole, which is
actually a very positive example that the
international community can get together
and solve an environmental problem
with an economical component
quite quickly, quite quickly, if it
is necessary.
And in the coming years,
this EPA will
be proposed. So, again, it is just a
discussion currently.
And if you're a version control fan like
me, this would be the equivalent to it
is not even staged yet.
So keep down, everyone.
It will be super interesting, but it's
nothing to
boil up too much now.
And one important piece of
our point that I want to make is that
this concept collects a lot
of lot of different parts of the
discussion we have.
On the one hand, the geological
discussion like how do we define this in
the geological record?
But we also, of course, have all of these
environmental problems mixed into it and
they are related, but sometimes it's
necessary to focus just on one of them,
but still keep the big picture.
The people who are keeping the big
picture are definitely the so-called
Anthropocene Working Group or
working group on the Anthropocene.
They are located at the University of
Leicester and
that's their secretariat.
But of course, it's a global consortium
of scientists from a range
of different disciplines.
And maybe you noticed the summer.
The discussion did boil up a little bit
because there was a vote and like
an intermediary report
about how this working group wants to
continue preparing a a
formalization proposal.
And what I want to do now in the next
part is to walk you through of these
voting options and explain a little
bit what they mean, what their background
is and how they were received.
And the two core points are
that they are discussing what which
golden spike do we want to use, which
chemical signal in the geologic record.
And of course, closely tied to that
is the question, when did the
Anthropocene start or when will the start
be defined?
And to do that, we're going to use this
awesome chart.
No, not yet.
Well, there we are,
OK, and we start at the end of the
last ice age, you see in the middle of
this white part is basically the
minus one degree, plus one degree
range that our civilization has
experienced, because that's after the
last ice age. We started settling
down.
We started developing agriculture and
also one clearly negative
impact already, maybe not in the case of
this predator, but we did have
a hand in the extinction of many large
mammals. So wherever we went on this
planet, on every continent, we find
evidence that very quickly after humans
arrive, the big mammals
start to vanish. In some cases, there's a
climate change component in it,
but sometimes we just hunted them down.
Now, the key words here are megafauna
extinction and deformation in case you're
interested. And these
three parts, for example, are these three
such discussions.
They are visible in the archeological
record and also in the chemical record,
in the geology.
And therefore, there has been the
suggestion that basically the whole
Holocene should be replaced with the
so-called Anthropocene.
However, this has received little
attention by the working group.
So we move on a few thousand years and
now we have all over the world
cultures and civilizations rising.
And with that, of course, you can
imagine you need some level of intensive
agriculture.
So, for example, converting
forest land into farmland, mechanically
tilling the farmland, fertilizing
it, and in some cases even changing
the morphology of the landscape to suit
the particular crop that is
grown in some regions.
So because we find these signals all over
the world and still after hundreds and
thousands of years, you can still detect
chemically that a particular soil
was created by humans.
This is called anthropogenic soils.
And yeah, there were a few more votes,
but essentially
it's a delay.
I'm sorry.
OK, it was rejected.
Let's leave it at that.
Then we move on
now, are you going to see the replay?
I'm already on the next slide.
Is there anything we can do?
OK, well, we go to one obvious
candidate, the industrial revolution.
As you know, the coal,
the fossil fuel coal was
became the major energy source.
And with it came the pollution from
coal dust, from coal soot.
And now, because especially the European
nations, they have basically conquered
the world. They brought this pollution
with them. So finally now we also have a
global signal of anthropogenic
pollution. However, for some reason,
this option was also rejected.
So and now the question becomes
political, because up to now, all of this
has happened in the very
far away past and nobody alive
was basically at fault.
But now we're entering the 20th
century. And for the geologists,
fortunately, a lot of candidates
can be used here in the geological
record.
Not so fortunately for us.
There's also a third one, which is not in
the chart, and that is the plastics
from convenience products that, of
course, rises rise with a
consumer culture.
And there is already evidence that this
is entering the geological record,
for example, in this case from Hawaii,
where, of course, volcanic activity
creates new rock all the time.
Plastic trash is simply incorporated.
And additionally, micro plastic particles
are in all of the oceans and they
also sink down into the sediments.
So now we have a show sorry, the
plastic part was also rejected, although
quite an interesting stratigraphic
evidence in my opinion.
And now we basically have a little
showdown between the nuclear weapons
here and the fossil fuel emissions.
But before we resolve
this showdown, I'm a bit lucky
that both of these topics have been
featured at this conference before.
So I encourage you to watch these talks
in January as early as possible before
you have a big tsunami of all of these
talks here.
There is, interestingly, a connection
between these topics.
On the one hand, we have this engineering
and physical and, of course, political
topic of the nuclear weapons.
And on the other hand, geology,
chemistry and climate science and
archeology plays into this as well.
You maybe know the so-called radiocarbon
method that is used to determine
the age of biological samples.
So you know that in the atmosphere
there's a certain amount of radioactive
carbon, 14, that filters down
to CO2, to the plants, the animals.
And when we are some kind of living
organism stops breathing, the
decay starts both on the biological side
and also in terms of radioactive carbon.
And when you find a biological sample,
you can measure how much a radiocarbon is
left and thereby calculate backwards
with the help of the half life, which
is five thousand three hundred seventy
years, how old
the sample is.
But because we because of the
nuclear weapons testing we have added, a
lot of it is
delayed again, a bit.
Not going to use the slides dotcom again.
Yeah. Or only whether the land cable
network.
Now we said, OK, this
is the so-called radiocarbon bomb spike.
So we added a lot of carbon 14 into the
atmosphere. So biological samples
that were generated in this time start
out with a lot more radioactive carbon.
So in the future archeological record,
they will appear much younger than they
actually are.
However, in the near future, we will
reach the equilibrium point basically
on the baseline again and
then depending on which
of this representative
concentration pathways we
take, future samples
will appear much older because we have
diluted the radioactive carbon
from the nuclear weapons testing
with fossil fuel emissions from
the coal and
the oil we are burning.
And you can easily imagine with five
thousand three hundred seventy
years life, the fossil fuels are
millions and millions of years old.
They do not contain any radioactive
carbon anymore.
So we are in effect,
polluting both the present and the
future, but also the past or
the future past.
So now this is quite an interesting
golden spike, but
also rejected.
So and now we basically have the end
of this showdown, we have on the one
hand, the plutonium fallout and
the fossil fuels, they produce two
possible golden spikes.
That is, of course, the
the fuel ashes and also the CO2
concentration in the atmosphere.
Yeah, and the final vote was 10
to five, basically
for the nuclear weapons.
And remember, I mean, we're talking about
geologists here. They need to have stuff
in the sediments in the rock.
So something that actually falls out of
the sky and then even is radioactive
in the rock is a much more interesting
signal to look for than something that
stays in the sky.
And now I want to make two important
points here. I mean, I was talking about
this a bit nonchalantly, but
this, of course, quite problematic and
horrible topics.
But now the chat goes on.
We have
the the problem here that science
sometimes needs to be a bit now
devoid of emotions to keep a clear head,
because that's how it works.
Now we have to stick to the science, but
we don't we shouldn't forget that these
are quite horrible topics in some cases.
And also we have a mixture here.
Now, again, as I mentioned before,
between the.
Yeah. Geological part of the discussion,
which is purely on the nuclear
weapons side of the discussion
and all the ecological problems that
arise from fossil fuel emissions.
And the chart goes on.
As you know, Robin,
Frank talked about this
last year.
So I encourage you to also watch this
talk again.
And now the geologists
have basically everything they need.
They have a clear goal, what to search
for in the stratigraphic records.
This will take the regular amount
of time and science like projects are
going on, expeditions are mounted,
drill course will be drilled.
And in a few years, there will most
likely be a formally a formal proposal
to have the Anthropocene accepted
as an epoch in the geological record.
And then the International Commission on
Stratigraphy will vote on it.
That part, I don't know how long it will
take and I have not read any good
estimates. In some cases this has taken
many, many decades and those
are not influenced by the glaciers.
But when they do, we can be pretty sure
that this nice international Cronos
stratigraphic chart will
be updated quite quickly.
So sticking to the theme
of this Congress, I mean, does it still
work right now?
It does not really.
I mean, you saw this the
representative concentration pathway's
here, there from the IPCC.
We are on this path currently.
And just from a few days ago,
the CO2 reading in the atmosphere
is over 400 ppm.
Before the industrial age, it was 280.
So.
And please notice that these are not
fossil fuel emissions, these are
concentration pathways, so they include
natural sources for greenhouse gases.
So we have to account for that as well.
But what we need to do definitely is to
reduce the greenhouse gas emissions
a few years ago.
The recommendation was by 10 percent each
year. Let's make it 20 to
be safe, you know?
So if you want to do something and
try to identify something in your life
that directly produces fossil
fossil fuel emissions of greenhouse gas
emissions and 20 percent is an easy
thing to calculate, just try to do 20
percent less of it.
Also, there's, of course, not an
individual thing to solve.
This also needs
global campaigns.
You probably know the students
divestment campaign in the
U.S. where students try to convince
their administrations in the universities
to stop investing endowment funds
into fossil fuel companies.
We also need to stop the operations that
we're currently doing because just the
resources that we have already tapped
will most likely push us past the two
degree goal or one point five degree goal
that was at the
Paris climate conference
last year was agreed politically.
So the so-called stranded
assets that the that the companies have
in their books, they are worthless.
And also the stuff that they
think they have found that is also
worthless, basically.
And one now
maybe a bit more critical thing is you
can still study how to find and extract
fossil fuel resources in universities.
So we also have to think about maybe we
need to divest educationally as well,
because it's maybe it's not ethical to
train young people for jobs that will
not be available in the future.
Yeah, also there's
a closely related to education is, of
course, behavior, and there we
have a problem with a so-called rebound
effect.
Um, so you sometimes
expect to save some amount of energy
or some amount of resources if you
introduce a new technology, for example.
But then the adaptation of
behavior of people eats up
all of these savings.
So in the worst case, you can even have a
backfire effect that, for example, people
drive more cars if they buy more fuel
efficient cars and thereby in total, all
over the world, the, um, the
savings are not actually realized at all.
And by the way, if you know an example of
the so-called super conservation, where
not only do you save everything
that you were expecting, but you save
actually more, please let me know.
I tried to find something now.
So we have, as I mentioned before, the
cost. I mean, the engines are getting
more efficient all the time,
but the cars get heavier, more
functions are built in.
They use more energy in total.
Also in this community, we get
more batteries, better batteries all the
time. But we use our devices much
more intensively.
So many of us require apparently
external batteries.
So these are behavioral problems,
of course. And I don't
want to pick on jetlag specifically
because they really build a great
product.
But what they are advertising is what I
would like to label convenience
computing.
CPU's are becoming more efficient.
Computing becomes cheaper and cheaper.
So we use it just for every single little
thing that we can imagine.
And this is ineffective
behavior that invalidates the
improvements in technology that we
definitely have.
But the solution or the
takeaway point here is that technology
alone will not save us.
So we have to adapt the behavior
a little bit.
I'm not a little bit.
So to start the summary, I think I'm good
in turn, I'm answering
my own questions a little bit.
So it is not yet a new geological
epoch, but it will be in a few years
or it will at least be proposed.
And then we will see, um.
Did we do it?
Yep.
Was it an accident?
This is interesting.
More than 100 years ago, the discussion,
whether CO2 or in this case,
carbonic acid in the air
might actually be a problem for us was
already going on.
I mean, the pollution directly from coal
was very visible,
but also the understanding that increases
in CO2 concentration would change.
The chemistry of the atmosphere was
already known.
And there's also I think this is
something Robert Frank called for
last year. There is a campaign
to prosecute the managers of
Exxon Mobile because they
threw some leaks. We learned that
they were internally conducting a pretty
good research, actually, on how
fossil fuels and carbon dioxide emissions
and climate change were related in the
70s and 80s.
But they still continue to mislead the
public as, for example,
the tobacco industry did about the health
risks of smoking for a long time
as well.
So it was not an accident.
And the welcome part, well, that is
on us, of course.
I want to quickly give you an overview of
the blogs and podcasts that I
used for this research, also used
for maybe the academic references
in some places as well.
These are all highly recommendable and
the slides are online as well.
So that's how the opening
ceremony closed.
You know, and also, if you saw the movie,
let's get to it.
This is not too difficult to do.
Thank you very much.
Let's see if we have any questions.
My five minutes, OK?
Everything from the Internet, maybe the
RNC channel.
I mean, while people line up, I already
got one question from the Internet myself
that I can already answer.
Yeah, the Anthropocene will, of course,
end at some point, most likely
when there's a different type of
influence globally that a new type of
strata will form and
a future generation of geologists will
find the next spike.
How long that will take.
You see down there this current research
that probably the sea level rise, for
example, will go on for many, many
thousand years.
So what we most likely have already done
is to stop the cycle of ice ages
and warm ages that was actually due.
So maybe we're lucky that
only we.
I see we have one question for microphone
three.
Oh, thank you for your very dense
bringing everyone up to speed on the
Anthropocene. I've been following it for
some time because in
how Turin and Berlin has been covering
it for about four years and now
they've moved on to a new framing
of the issue called Technosphere.
And in both of these terms for me,
where the controversy gets really
intense and perhaps the struggle
gets very intense, is
that the term and the way it's being
used by the academic departments
is a bit confusing
the issue in a way that
points the blame on us as
a human species.
And there is another analysis that points
the blame at something like the
capitalist scene or the corporate
scene. And it's that the systems
of of our societies operating
mechanisms are really are what
are behind something that could
and looks very catastrophic
for not only the human
species, but
millions of species.
And in fact, we're perhaps moving into
what's being called a sixth mass
extinction and the Anthropocene.
The problem is that it's almost like
it's it's describing it in a way that
we can handle this with some
technological solutions.
And it's really kind of something that's
out of control and
and it obfuscates the fact that
we really need to, like, kind of repair
nature rather than thinking we're going
to fix nature for our benefit
now. And so it's
it's a really long debate.
And I've been following this for some
time, but I think it's really something
to extend the conversation from
what you just gave us for information.
So I thank you for that.
And if you've heard about this
Technosphere, I would ask you if you know
where that's leading us,
not about this particular term.
Thanks. I wrote some research and,
um, yeah, I
did mention this, uh, mix up.
And I agree it is an extremely
different a difficult topic with many
topics. Um,
I can agree only with you and I'll be
available later for discussion up here.
Thank you very much.
If there are no further questions, I will
thank them once again.
How about a big round of applause for
her?