Posts Tagged ‘holocene’
The Wonders and Terrors of Humanity’s Impact on Earth
By Laura Leavitt | Hyperallergic Featuring stunning landscape photography, the documentary Anthropocene surveys a new era of human-driven geology. The cult film Koyaanisqatsi, named after the Hopi idea of “life lived out of balance,” contains no dialogue, but rather scenes all over the world — of cities, nature, the tiniest industrially produced products, and the vastness of canyons.…
Read More‘Anthropocene: The Human Epoch’ Review: Global Warnings
By Ben Kenigsberg | The New York Times “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch” puts a frightening twist on the standard nature documentary. Rather than exalting the awesome beauty of landscapes or animals, it captures alarming ways in which that beauty has been disturbed. The movie takes its cues from the research of the Anthropocene Working Group, a team of…
Read MoreWorld’s Oldest Cave Glacier Reveals 10,000 Years of Climate Data
By Cassie Kelly | EcoWatch Deep inside the Apuseni Mountains you’ll find the Scărișoara Ice Cave in Transylvania, the oldest cave glacier in the world. You’ll also find some pretty incredible climate data from the last 10,000 years. An international team of scientists from several institutions, including the University of South Florida, University of Belfast and…
Read MoreThe Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age
By Damian Carrington | The Guardian | August 29, 2016 Humanity’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared, according to an official expert group who presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town on Monday. The new epoch should…
Read MoreAre We in the Anthropocene Yet?
By Zach St. George | Nautilus | May 23, 2016 In the early 1990s, a few miles west of El Kef, a town in Tunisia, geologists set a small golden spike in between two layers of clay that remains there to this day. They wanted to mark the tiny yet striking layer of iridium—a hard, dense, silvery-white…
Read MoreIn Search of the Anthropocene Epoch
BBC News | February 26, 2016 For more than 11,000 years, we have been living in a period of geological time called the Holocene. But researchers say our planet is undergoing a rapid transition, so much so that we have shifted into a new epoch: the Anthropocene, the age of humans. Continue reading and watch…
Read MoreThe Anthropocene: Great Marketing, Wrong Product
By Brad Allenby | Slate | February 8, 2016 It was in 2011 that the Economist, a publication usually known for arcane speculation on geopolitics and economics, welcomed its readers to the Anthropocene and warned that humans had “changed the way the world works.” The drumbeat behind the concept has continued, recently receiving new momentum with the release in…
Read MoreHumans Leave a Telltale Residue on Earth
By David Biello | Scientific American | January 7, 2016 Evidence for a new geologic epoch continues to accumulate, like layers of sediment that over time harden into strata. Although those who study the branch of geology known as stratigraphy—the study of those strata and their resolution into Earth’s vast geologic time scale—will continue to debate the idea of…
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