thank you for all coming here to share this experience of timeand event, and in this case, rock. this is kind of following on fromdavid's magnificent introduction to the anthropocene here. david used a scalpel rathermore often than the chainsaw. i will be using exclusivelya pickaxe and a sledge hammer, reverting to type asa geologist in this case, because i'll be talking aboutthe anthropocene as geological time which, for most geologists,means as rock,
as the evidence of ancient time that we have, that we cancompare the present with. david's already shown this. this is, if you like,all of geological time. it's one-third of cosmic ageand it takes 4.5 billion years of exceedingly complicated history and parcels it up into what wefondly hope are usable chunks of time which are all given nameslike 'carboniferous', 'cambrian' and 'pleistocene' and so forth.
those are defined both as timeand also as rock, as units of rock stratawhich represent that time. if the anthropocene is to join thisand go, as david said, right to the very top line,above the holocene, then it also has to have a physicalpresence that geologists can relate to and understandand compare with what they glean from the pastin ancient strata. the question is... there are many anthropocenes,
so here i'm going to restrict myselfto what we call the 'geological' or even worsethe 'stratigraphic ' anthropocene, which is the one that is nowbeing considered - i stress 'being considered' - for inclusion onthe geological time scale, which for geologists would bea very, very, very big step. the time scaleis the backbone of the science and it is not changed at all lightly and always very controversially.
again, the idea is old,in a certain sense. it might be said to begin with thecomte de buffon, georges leclerc, who, in 1778, wrote the firstscientifically based earth history. he had seven epochs and the last onewas... (speaks french) ..when the power of man helped,assisted that of nature. buffon was an optimist in that. again, the idea withgeorge perkins marsh and stoppani and vladimir vernadsky also, kind of resurfaced in various forms,
but also that humanswere affecting the physical, chemical, biological structureof the earth. one of the main thingsto remember is that for the most part... again, inthe dark ages of the last century, these ideas were broadlythought of as nonsense by almost allthe geological community because they could see this hugehistory - mountain-building, oceans openingand closing. there is edward berry in 1926saying something
which still resonates with quitea number of my colleagues today. that, yes, humans do lotsof the strange and amazing things but, as geology, it's nonsense because of the contrastin scale and time and all of these sorts of things. this is still the battleground, ifyou like, the theatre of discussions that we are on. the modern anthropocene, of course,started with this wonderful improvisation by paul crutzen,
a brilliant atmospheric chemist who was one of a small groupof people who resolved the large mysteryof the ozone layer with this idea that the earthhas changed, again, for the reasonsthat david outlined - changes to the chemistry, the biology,the physical structure of the earth. that, eventually... geologists are slow to catch onin this.
so the term had been in widespreaduse, not least by will steffen, who will be giving the keynotetomorrow on this. the earth system science community very quickly picked upthis term and used it as reflecting a new phaseof earth history. that is not quite geology because geology is the peoplewho live in the past and might definitely live in the pastin this sense. this term to work as geology,has to be translated into rock.
effectively, that's what i'll bespending the next few minutes going through - seeing what kindof rock, what kind of strata that are now being formedand how those may or my not be thought of as being distinctenough, at least within geology, to deserve their own name,their own formal name. the informal 'anthropocene',i think, is here for good. the question i'm dealing with,personally with my colleagues, including will and others, is whetherit should be formal geology. this, again,this is one of the early...
the geologists came in reallynot much more than five years ago on this and began to debatethis idea as geology and to form this working groupof the international commission. this is more or lessthe original idea which had very muchbased on paul crutzen. you have a long holocene,you have the pleistocene going back 2.5 million years, way outside there into the courtyard, many, many glaciations,interglacials.
and then 11,500 years ago, climate changed for the umpteenth,50th or so time, from glacial to interglacial times. relative stabilitythrough the holocene and then very, very later on - and this is more or less industrialrevolution line here with increasing human population,erosion, carbon dioxide and all of that. if we look at that a wee bitmore closely in here,
we'll come again to the fourthof these options that david talked about. we have, up there, againthe great acceleration - this wonderful phrase from willand john mcneil and paul crutzen - of growth in populationand energy use and much else and that is currentlythe leading geological candidate as an event thatleaves marks in strata... that's the important thing,for us as geologists, that can define an anthropocene.
currently, again, geologically, the anthropocene seemsto start about there. again, i stress that is still beingdebated within the working group. we have not made anyformal recommendations yet. if we make formal recommendations there is no guarantee at allthat the international commission will take them upbecause we are the lowest rung of any possible hierarchy and allthe decisions are taken up there.
all we have is a privilege,if you like, of trying to understand thisphenomenon of the anthropocene. let's break it down to geology.we deal with rock. rocks are made of mineralsso what kind of minerals do we have in the anthropocene? the answer is quite a lot. there's a lovely piece of sculptureby the artist angela palmer on show in londona couple of weeks ago where the anthropocene is representedas this new mineral made of steel,
a very anthropocene material, never been seen in 4.5 billion yearsof earth history in this wonderful crystalline form. of course, all the metals are so nowfamiliar, the metals we have here forming the balustradeon the stairs and so on. these, geologically,are remarkable because the planet, nature,does not like uncombined metals. it combines them with oxygen,with silicon, with carbonate, with sulphide and so on.
native metals are a few -gold is one of them. to take things like aluminiumand titanium, all of these, and to purify them into their ownmineral, as it were, is one of many noveltiesof the anthropocene. as a geologist, i see it asa very geological one. it's partly kind.this is something new in kind. this is also new in scale. here's a graph... there won't betoo many graphs, i promise you. they'll all look like this...of aluminium,
first purified somewhere around hereand then negligible amounts, again, to this time in the mid-20thcentury, the amounts shoot up. we've produced of the orderof 500 million tons of aluminium around the earth.how much is that? what's a figure? it's enough to takesome standard kitchen foil and entirely coat the united statesof america in kitchen foil, and parts of canada as well. iron and steel- this is about anorder of magnitude more than that.
that can clearly cross continentsand so on. this is now being madein geological amounts. other minerals, there area lot of synthetic minerals, new types of garnet, the lasers. diamond is no longerthe hardest material on earth. it's boron nitride made now in hundreds of tonsas an industrial abrasive. there are many, many, many... your ballpoint pen in your pocket,the ball is probably made of
tungsten carbide, a novel mineralnow made in large amounts. how many of these mineralsare there? we don't know, nobody's counting. it's one of the big unknowns,if you like 'knowledge vacuums', of the anthropocene,is quite how many of these the industrial chemists have madeand the materials chemists. i would have thought, at leastcertainly thousands. how does that fit onto a scalewe'll look at in a minute but there's lot of others of thesenew types of chemical structure
which, effectively, are minerals. we also have mineraloids,things which don't have quite a fixed composition but compositionvaries within limits. glass is one. we have lots of glass around. plastics is a wonderful example. again, plastic is a novelform of polymer which can fossilise quite well. this, a day later, wascovered by a layer of tarmac
in the road outside my house so itwas going into the record already. here's one on a beach rockin portugal already becoming fossilised. how much plastic is there? all too much. this is an image ofpart of the spanish countryside. it probably represents, if you like,the global distribution of plastics. if you take the amount of plasticthat we have, up to now about 300 million tonsa year,
so that's roughlyeach of our own body weight a year of plastic being made,almost none recycled, almost all ending up somewherein the environment. if you then add that togetherfrom 1950, that's about five billion tons. with that you can wrapthe whole globe in one layer of cling filmor plastic wrap. it makes this, again,a representative part of the globe as regards to plastic.
what we have, again, this ideaof the speed of change. there are many forms of plastic nowand these have evolved rapidly in decades and even years to give us a very fine,what we call 'stratigraphy'. we can use plastics to date stratafar more finely than we can use dinosaurs or trilobites. if we just take a brief historyof minerals... again, this is kind ofthe big history of minerals. it started from the cosmos -
about a dozen minerals that arerather boring in outer-space. you build a solar system. the amount goes up -about 250 in meteorites. you build a planet,you stretch out the chemistry, you make more minerals. the big stepis 2.5 billion years ago when oxygen arrived on the planet. for every mineral you hadan oxide and hydroxide so you doubled the number,more or less.
then the number pretty wellstayed the same and you had a number of biologicalevents, none of which really shifted the number of minerals untilwe came along and made a spike of an unknown number of new minerals but probably equalling the numberof minerals already present on earth. minerals make rocks. we have a number of rocks and thisis probably the rock par excellence of the anthropocene - concrete. the romans made it.
this is what it looks like in that. this is if you magnify itin an electron microscope. it's a new world.there is a new world of concrete, full of fly-ash particles. there is nothing like thisi know of geologically at all. it is a very distinctive new formof rock that we're making. the amount, again, ina back-of-a-beer-mat calculation of the amount - 500 billion tons. that is enough to makeabout one kilo of concrete
on every square meter ofthe earth's surface, land and sea or you can make - and this is a lovely imageby the artist (inaudible) - you can make a full-scale replicaof the earth in a shell 2mm thick. the alien's doing that. it's a long story, several beersworth of story on that. bricks, again, not quite as much asconcrete but about a trillion bricks made every yearon that and they just go on and on. minerals make rocks.rocks make strata.
we make strata both by basicallybuilding stuff up on the surface in large heaps or by making holes in the groundto take that stuff out of. that is, even now,formally mapped geologically. it goes on geological maps. here's a part of london map and, again, the stuff piled upis green - the made ground, the stuff in the red is workedground - the holes in the ground, and the blue is where you takea hole in the ground
and fill it in againwith something else. all of these are effectivelyanthropocene or anthropogenic strata, again, present in large amounts now,particularly underneath our cities. we go further. the averageanimal can burrow down, i think the record is a nilecrocodile going down about 12 metres. we go down much furtherand we create networks. that's a bit of a paris metro. there's a gold mine 3kmbeneath south africa. i'm not sure i would liketo be down there.
we've riddled the ground... there's aplan of bauhaus off the netherlands. we have altered the substructureof the ground we live on as well as altering the surfacein a fairly large way. there's another one.there's the surface. it's what's underground that'simportant. a kilometre underground, there's a massiveradioactive and melted and broken up rock from a nucleartest, an underground nuclear test. again, there are about a couple ofthousand of these around the world. they're very big in scale.
again, there's nothing like themin earth history. we scrape the ocean floor... we troll the ocean floor -plough it effectively, and therefore restructuremost of the continental shelves to catch fish for us. that is another way of making strata,both undersea and on land. chemistry, there'slots of chemistry. here's just a few examples ofthe way we're changing the chemistry of what we call 'chemo stratigraphy',the chemistry of strata.
again, typically we do this by allthe things we do to keep ourselves comfortable. here's a nice example.it's a relatively new example. if you don't know what smokelooks like, this is smoke. it is a particle of industrial smoke from the high-temperature burningof hydrocarbons, about 20,000ths of a millimetreacross. these are almost indestructible. they're very, very indigestibleand so things don't eat them
and they pile upin the soil and lake sediments. again, you haveanother hockey stick. none of these fly-ash particles and then they really begin to buildup from the mid-20th century. in fact, what we've doneis we've smoked the earth. there is a physical layer of strata marked by havingthese smoke particles which you can extract by standardmicro paleontological techniques, to characterizean anthropocene stratal unit.
co2 goes up again. this is something that has beenand will be discussed. you can get fossil air in icein greenland and antarctica. of course, that shows us again,as david has shown, we've had this rather remarkablestability of co2 going up and down. we're on up and we've taken itabout another third up. again, we're back aboutthree to five million years ago in the pleistocene epoch as regardsto the chemistry of air, of co2, and we're waiting to see whatwill happen because of that.
what has already happened...again, to a geologist, we're looking for marks in strata. because of the burning of co2, that coal and oil has got a specificchemical composition of isotopes and we can see that asthe amount of co2 is burned - the isotope chemistry of carbon in the surface absorbed by woodand shells and things like that has gone down and has spiked, so wecan already read that in strata. to us, that's important.
of course, because over 400,000 yearsthe co2 has gone up and done, the temperature has gone up and down,more or less in lock step. what we're beginning to see... again, this is part of one ofthe great questions for the day. ..is temperature going up, and the other hockey stickin the last century or so has just gone upby degrees centigrade. of course we're waiting againto see what will happen. ice is beginning to melt.
we know that. here's a recent paper just out lastyear showing the freshening of the water around antarcticabecause enough ice is melting to put something like200-400 million tons of water dumped out into the oceans. because of things like that, the sea level is beginning to creepup, geologically, is just beginning to creep upby three millimetres a year. we're making the oceans more acid.again, this is well known.
as co2 goes up it dissolvesin the water, ph goes down. it's gone down by about1/10 of a ph point. that's about 30% more hydrogen ionsin the water. what we may well do is,as we did 55 million years ago - not 'we' but the earth did, when it naturally releaseda lot of co2 and methane it acidified the oceansand literally, here at this point, dissolved the ocean floor. it dissolved the carbonateson the ocean floor.
with another hundred ppmin the atmosphere, we threaten to begin to do the samekind of thing and, therefore, amongst other things,to stop coral reefs growing. that's not just the end ofan ecosystem, but for geologists, it's the endof a type of rock - coral reef rock and reef limestone, the kind of things that weput on geological maps. again, another one, thishas already been mentioned. the nitrogen spike,it's a bigger perturbation
than the carbon perturbation,perhaps the biggest perturbation, though it's harder to tell becausethe chemistry's more difficult, since the early protozoic2.5 billion years ago. because of this massiveappropriation, again, it leaves a signalin lake sediments all through the northern hemisphere, you can see the nitrogen chemistrytake a dip from about 50, 70 years ago. again, to us that's importantbecause it's a mark in rock strata,
an environmental eventthat is going on. one of the effects of thatis to begin to change, not just the chemistrybut the biology of those lakes far distantfrom any agriculture. this is nitrogen - aerosols traveling for hundredsof thousands of kilometres, landing in a distant lakeand beginning to change the populations of algae and diatomsand such like. you go from one sort of fossilto another sort of fossil.
this is the work of alex wolfeand others in these distant lakes. again, it is like present daypalaeontology in action, biology becoming palaeontology. of course, another event is thosefertilizers pour off of the fields into the riversand then into the sea. nitrogen and phosphorous thatisn't used then is used to create plankton blooms. those die, sink to the sea floor, decay, use up oxygen and thesethings called 'dead zones' formed.
currently something like250,000 square kilometres around the earth - chesapeake bay,the baltic and so on - being killed off,literally being suffocated, every summer before the winterstorms bring the oxygen back. again, this will leave a markin the sediments that are accumulating at the bottomof those seas that will become the stratain the future. another signal...this, again, this one that, so far, unless...with a coupleof horrible exceptions
at the end of the second world war,this is the signal that is still environmentally trivialbut it's a marker. again, for geologistsit's a marker of sediments that we are all contaminated, you and i and this carpet here,with enough plutonium and caesium to measure, to register. all sediments since 1952 or so are also contaminated and havea marker, a plutonium marker, in them which will lastat least 100,000 years.
fossils.again, i'm a palaeontologist. i like fossils. they're great fun. one can be a child all your lifelooking at fossils. it's a great excuse. this is a trace. we have body fossils, bones, teeth, we have trace fossils -tracks and trails. there's a track and trail in thecambrian about 500 million years ago. it might have been a goodsaturday night with that pattern.
there's one of our equivalents. these don't last. they won'tlast on here, for instance. that's another one. this is a niceone, it's one of my favourites. it's a fossilised wasp's nestmade of little bits of pumice. it's a million years or so oldon tenerife and you can find hundreds of theseif you know where to look. in sydney, this is oneof the equivalents - as is the buildingwe're standing in. it's a thing formed of rock,effectively, or things that come out
of the ground, which is somethingwe've made and which can fossilise, hence a trace fossil. our trace fossil systems are huge. this is part of a trace fossilsystem called 'shanghai' which goes on and on and on and our trace fossil system extendin different ways across the fields. again, we alter those ina way that can be preserved if you're in the right placeto be preserved so we have different patterns.
again, this is something remarkable. there's been nothing like, if youlike, the urban trace fossil system or the urban stratumin 4.5 billion years of geology. body fossils - if you likemore traditional fossils... this is jane. jane is leicester university'steenage dinosaur, teenage tyrannosaur. it's one type of fossil. here's another one, a nice trilobite.
fossils are used... again, another graph.this is half a billion years, here. ..to track the history of life,the ups and downs of life from the cambrian here,ordovician, radiation here and then the dips are the massextinction events where life takes a tumble. of course, we have our own tumbleat the moment in the anthropocene. how big is that tumble? again, this is a famous exampleis the poor dodo,
the didus ineptus -give it a name like that. that is insult to injuryif ever i heard it. the yangtze dolphin, photographedand now probably extinct. the costa rican golden toad,discovered about 1964, i think, extinct around about 1990, one of many, particularly amphibians. how big an event is this? this is work done, extraordinary work, by tony barnosky,
again, who's one of the membersof the working group, who asked this question.is it here yet? do we have a mass extinction event? the answer is, "no, not yet," because in terms of number ofspecies we know to be extinct, that is still1%, 2%, something like that. in terms of numbers of specieson the edge, and in very low numbers,critically endangered, we're now in the tens of percent,up to more than 50%.
with business as usual, theprediction was 200 or 300 years time, simply with the ongoingindustrialization, deforestation, that will give us a cretaceous-tertiary boundary stylesize mass-extinction event. that hasn't yet happened. like global warming, it hasn't yetreally happened, not geologically. but this has. it's the invaders. if i introduce you to one or two. this invaderyou will know very well here.
this invader - this is my cat controlling the ecology ofthe back garden with an iron paw. the number of cats, this is alovely, again, one of (inaudible) lovely illustrations of cats... for every wild tigerleft in the wild now, there is something like 100,000domestic-style cats in the world. all over the world. they're all doingvery well, thank you very much. they'll carry on doing very well, whether they're feral or whetherthey co-opt us as their slaves.
a hundred-thousand cats, you'dprobably fill the lecture theatre. i don't know, i would say about20,000 cats so about five of these. it gives a scale of the changein assemblage of biology across the planet. rats, as well, another examplewhich have gone across the world. other things - invertebrates - the zebra mussel,originally from russia which came across to north american and did very, very,very well for itself.
that's in the last decade or so. it's taken over, if you like,the waterways of the usa. it is a key fossil of the future. for us, it is a fossil event marker. it will be certainly thatin the future. this is big-scale. if you take new zealand, you havealmost as many invasive species as you have native species and if you have some groups likemammals, many more invasives.
of course, all this relatesbecause of us. if, again, we go back to the kindof themes that david came with. this is, if you like,a cartoonification of (inaudible) diagram. we make up quite a lotof vertebrate biomass. the animals we keep to eatmakes up most. and wildlife is there. again, this links in withthe nitrogen and the phosphorous. we have turbocharged the trappingof energy into chlorophyll.
we feed it very efficientlyinto our animals and we feed that efficiently into us. this total size is probablyan order of magnitude greater than was present, if you like, in a pre-industrialized,a pre-nitrogen, pre-farming landscape. other things... here's oneof the key future fossils. the anthropocene chicken is hugeand has different bones to the chicken that our parentsused to eat.
this is the commonest birdin the world now and the one withthe shortest lifespan and the one which is turning up mostin our garbage pits and so on. they will fossilise well. the sea is, of course, as well... we are both taking out lots of fish,rearranging the ecosystem and, also, beginning to produce thesetransgenic fish, which are also... they will loom large, i think,in all of our lives in the future.
the other thing,related to a question that was said, the things that we make are objects, artefacts, which we'vebegun to call 'techno fossils' because a lot of them are commonand preservable into the future, fossilisable. the amount of that ishugely greater than the amount of us and also evolving fast. here's the evolution of the safetyrazor in the deutsches museum's lovely exhibit on this.
it's evolving. it's decoupledfrom the evolution of us and it is developing into something that peter haff of duke universityhas called the 'technosphere'. that is a new system budded offthe biosphere, which is now operatingunder its own dynamics and we are part, and he would arguea captive part, component, of the technosphere, whichwill evolve under its own dynamics. the notion of david's planeand so on comes to mind in this. here is, if you like, the evidencefor the prosecution
for the anthropoceneas a geological unit, a unit of strataand a unit of time simultaneously. we have this kind ofcombined thing in geology. really, that is currently up fordiscussion and being discussed. are we really breaking throughto something quite new? as john mcneil put it inhis wonderful book title, 'something new under the sun'? i'll just leave youwith that thought, an anthropocene sunsetwith the jet contrail in the air
and hopefully some of the controlsof that. thank you for your patiencewith all of this rock stuff.