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Enter the Anthropocene: Age of Man

  • Elizabeth Kolbert (author)
Chapter of: Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life(pp. 28–33)

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Metadata
TitleEnter the Anthropocene
SubtitleAge of Man
ContributorElizabeth Kolbert (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0014.1.03
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/making-the-geologic-now/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
CopyrightKolbert, Elizabeth
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2012-12-04
Long abstractThe path leads up a hill, across a fast-moving stream, back across the stream, and then past the carcass of a dead sheep. In my view it’s raining, but here in the Southern Up-lands of Scotland, I am told, this counts only as a light drizzle, or smirr. Just beyond the final switchback, there’s a waterfall, half shrouded in mist, and an outcropping of jagged rock. The rock has bands that run vertically, like a layer cake that’s been tipped on its side. My guide, Jan Zalasiewicz, a British stratigrapher, points to a wide stripe of gray. “Bad things happened in here,” he says. The stripe was laid down some 440 million years ago, as sediments slowly piled up on the bottom of an ancient ocean. In those days, life was still mostly confined to the water, and it was undergoing a crisis. Between one edge of the three-foot-thick gray band and the other, some 80 percent of marine species died out, most of them the sorts of creatures, like grap-tolites, that no longer exist in any form. The extinction event, known as the end-Ordovician, was one of the five biggest of the last half-billion years. It coincided with extreme changes in climate, in global sea levels, and in ocean chemistry—all caused, perhaps, by a supercontinent drifting over the South Pole.Stratigraphers like Zalasiewicz are, as a rule, hard to impress. Their job is to piece together Earth’s history from clues that can be coaxed out of layers of rock millions of years after the fact. They take the long view—the extremely long view—of events, only the most violent of which are likely to leave behind lasting traces. It’s those events that mark the crucial episodes in the planet’s 4.5-billion-year story, the turning points that divide it into comprehensible chapters.from
Page rangepp. 28–33
Print length6 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)