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The Arrogance of the Anthropocene
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- namirez 7y agoIt seems to me this person is missing the point. When people talk about Anthropocene, they're not talking about geological or fossil evidence left behind by humans in million of years. Anthropocene refers to the Holocene or the sixth mass extinction on the planet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
- chimi 7y agoMy understanding is that the Anthropocene is definable because human gas emissions have created a visible layer in the rock strata that will be evident for millions of years. Geological time from now, there will be a black line in the rocks that will include the toxic chemicals coming from our industrial processes and tail pipes.
- namirez 7y agoI think you are right.
- ncmncm 7y agoHe makes the point in the article that there are innumerable unnamed razor-thin layers in the rocks already. What's one more? Why would anyone be drawn to study that one?
- chimi 7y agoOkay, now I get it. I missed that part of the article. That's the arrogance. I like the ideas in a lot of these articles, I just don't have time to read them all. I miss the old days of tldr's.
- rexaliquid 7y agoHolocene and Anthropocene refer to the epoch, not the extinction event occurring during that epoch. An epoch is a measure of geological time.
- nostrademons 7y agoHe wrote a similar piece on why earth is not in the middle of a sixth mass extinction: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends-of-the-world/529545/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends...
- gameswithgo 7y ago>If, in the final 7,000 years of their reign, dinosaurs became hyperintelligent, built a civilization, started asteroid mining, and did so for centuries before forgetting to carry the one on an orbital calculation, thereby sending that famous valedictory six-mile space rock hurtling senselessly toward the Earth themselves—it would be virtually impossible to tell. I consider this claim to be complete nonsense. Change my mind. There are 4 billion year old rocks still on the earth to be found. 7,000 years of civilization is not going to be completely erased in a few million.
- CoreSet 7y agoWhat about if dinosaurs got to the point of early hunter-gatherers - establishing communities, language, basic tools - but were then wiped out? It's different from the case he cites, but tracks the general point that there are limits to what we can learn about prehistory / "deep time"
- api 7y agoThink of it this way: distance in time is like distance in space. It's just another dimension (with the catch that apparently we can't actually move backward). The dinosaurs are as far from us as Alpha Centauri, maybe further.
- jerf 7y agoThis is a reasonable way of looking at time for certain purposes, and the conversion factor is c. So, 65 million years "ago" is also 65 million light-years "away" in the -t direction.
- Udik 7y agoIf we can find their fossilized skeletons, can't we find their stone tools? Maybe scattered around their ritual burials?
- chimi 7y agoBy some back of the napkin calculations I did once, I found that a couple billion years is enough for the tectonic plates to have completely recycled themselves into the mantle, erasing any structures built on them.
- CoreSet 7y agoAs an addendum, the author, Peter Brannen, published another article with The Atlantic titled "What Made Me Reconsider the Anthropocene" four days ago. In it, he responds to criticism and ultimately comes to the conclusion that - even if no trace of humanity is left (no civilization, tools, etc) in "deep time" - the biosphere itself has been changed by humanity, and that gives the concept of the Anthroprocene validity. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/10/anthropocene-epoch-after-all/599863/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/10/anthropo...
- Sandman 7y agoCool, I didn't know about that one! I'm going to check it out, thanks for the link!
- FooHentai 7y agoI think this should be front-and-center rather than an addendum point - Can't help but question the good faith of an author putting this article up while only recently having published one that appears to take an opposite view. Frankly, smells like click bait dressed up as high-brow op-ed. I was going to post a comment in response to some of the points in the article, but upon seeing that the other article existed... what's the point?
- nostrademons 7y agoI read both and think that the second supports the point made in the first. The point of the anthropocene, as presented in the second article, is to acknowledge the effect humans have already had on the earth. The point of the first is to acknowledge how little an effect that is, relative to other events in geologic time. The events described in that article still stand - global temperature differences of 8C over a few tens of thousands of years, sea levels 400 feet lower (and that was a blink of an eye ago in geologic time), a 90M year long ice age.
- acqq 7y ago> The point of the first is to acknowledge how little an effect that is, relative to other events in geologic time. And speaking only about that geologic time is deceptive, without mentioning context: for the biggest part of the whole geologic time, not even multi-cellular life existed. Half of the whole geologic time, nothing was able to depend on oxygen as the modern life does -- there wasn't much of it in the atmosphere. The time human civilizations existed is microscopic in comparison to these spans, but that much shorter time is what defines us. And in that time, the climate was indeed quite stable. Until the last hundred or two years. And humans did make immense impact on the life forms, and will continue to make.
- nostrademons 7y agoThe holocene always struck me as odd. Here we have the final geologic epoch, and it's 10,000 years old, and every other geologic epoch is ~50M years long. And it just happens to coincide with the rise of our species, who just happens to be the one creating the taxonomy. Paleohistory is pretty fascinating, and it's easy to forget just how small we are on this big earth and how much things differ from today. For example: We're technically in an icehouse age. An icehouse age is defined as "any period of time where glaciers exist anywhere on the planet". For about 80% of geologic time, there is no such thing as a glacier, or of snow and ice for that matter. The entire earth's surface is above freezing, even the North and South poles. What we know of as an "ice age" (a glaciation) is a feature only of icehouse states. We currently happen to be in an interglacial of an icehouse age, which is why we think of this as being a warm period. But geologically, the earth is well below its temperature average. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earth It's likely that the earth has completely frozen over on at least two occasions, with the entire planet being encased in a gigantic ice sheet like Europa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth The larger of these two incidents may have been triggered by the evolution of photosynthesis and the addition of oxygen into the earth's atmosphere, which also likely caused a major mass extinction among the dominant anaerobic bacteria of the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event Sea level over time has fluctuated by 300-400 meters. That means that anything at an altitude of less than about 1000 feet (which is the vast majority of human settlements) was once underwater. (Well, technically land level fluctuates more than sea level, so most of these low-lying areas are actually sediment weathered off of nearby mountains.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_sea_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_sea_level There've been some massive outburst floods in the past, like the draining of Glacial Lake Missoula (a pleistocene lake roughly half the volume of Lake Michigan, held in by an ice dam on the Clark River nearly 2000 feet tall) which released an outflow 13 times the size of the Amazon River: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods
- ncmncm 7y agoAnd produced the whole Columbia Gorge in just two weeks. Most likely almost all of human history in the Americas, and maybe too in Africa, is 200 feet under the sea.
- ilaksh 7y agoIt's obvious that human history is very short but it's less obvious that all of our buildings and trash will be so hard to find underground in five million years or so. Wouldn't there at least be some places where ruins or landfills were largely exposed? And aren't there lots of materials that would stand out since they degrade slowly? For example, what is going to happen to all of the concrete and steel in Manhattan in the course of five million years? Will it really be compressed to a thin layer that is barely noticeable or something?
- ncmncm 7y agoIt will all wash away, sand grain by sand grain. You can see the erosion of stone temples even a thousand years old, made of harder stuff than concrete.
- Donald 7y ago>Will our influence on the rock record really be so profound to geologists 100 million years from now, whoever they are, that they would look back and be tempted to declare the past few decades or centuries a bona fide epoch of its own? Yes, there will be a thin but noticeable layer of hydrocarbons and odd pollution signatures in the crust that will act as a permanent geologic record of our existence.
- ncmncm 7y ago"Humanity: it was thin but noticeable." If you were specifically looking for it. Somebody might notice a lack of elephant teeth above a peculiar boundary, or a reduction in fish bones and corals, and look closer at the boundary. But to notice a lack is much harder than to notice the advent of something new. A layer of paperclips might not attract much attention, once oxidized, or be interpreted with anything like fidelity.