Conversation with Jan Zalasiewicz
A conversation with Jan Zalasiewicz on the geological Anthropocene research. (...)
Defining a New Earth Epoch
The geological time scale and the work of the Anthropocene Working Group. (...)
Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently asked questions on the work to define the Anthropocene. (...)
Unearthing the Present
What is the new geological epoch made of? Unearthing the Present connected the geological analysis of the present with a discussion of the changing scope for social and political agency. (...)
Where is the Planetary?
Where is the Planetary? is a collective search for models of living together on Earth. (...)
A Javanese Anthropocene?
Geographer and writer Adam Bobbette describes the reciprocal and porous relationship between society and geology in early twentieth-century Java, and Julia Adeney Thomas argues that the novelty of the Anthropocene lies in the shift from local geology to the chronicling of the Earth system (...)
A Mid-Twentieth Century Start Date for Anthropocene Geology
Christoph Rosol sketches out the marriage of paleoceanography with isotope chemistry in the middle of the twentieth century, part of a synchronism between the onset of the Anthropocene and the emergence of the technical means of understanding it. (...)
Against the Aestheticization of Technofossils
Plastic represents a particularly alluring material legacy in the rock record—but as Andrea Westermann shows, for its health and environmental hazards, consumerism and the exploitation of migrant labor, plastic is a deeply troubling material. (...)
Anthropogenic Fire as the Hinge between Earth System and Strata
(...)
Anthropogenic Markers as Environing Media
Media scholar Adam Wickberg outlines how knowledge about the environment and media technologies have always evolved in tandem; the history of anthropogenic markers can therefore be understood as a process of environing media. (...)
Anthropogenic Threats to Ecosystems in the Anthropocene
(...)
As We Used to Float
Julian Charrière and Nadim Samman take us on a dive into Bikini Atoll to tell the story of the post-atomic ghostlands and the never-to-end heritage of contamination in the blasted reefs. (...)
Biological and Paleontological Signatures of the Anthropocene
Lakes, seas, estuaries, and wetlands provide important archives of humanity’s reconfiguration of life in the Anthropocene. (...)
Closed Chemical Cycles
It’s possible that the most suitable golden spike for marking the beginning of the Anthropocene does not yet exist. (...)
Combustion Products as Markers for the Anthropocene
(...)
Concrete: A Stratigraphic Marker for the Anthropocene
We are live in the venerable International Court of Stratigraphic Arbitration, and on trial is the question whether concrete, the unparalleled material, is indeed an admissible marker for defining the onset of the Anthropocene. (...)
Conversations Beyond the Human
(...)
Ephemeral Biosphere
(...)
Geological Evidences
We live to burn and we burn to live. Artist Matthew C. Wilson pieces together the pyrogenic deep time of rifts, violent changes that also always produce new possibilities. (...)
Historical Assessment of the “Anthropogenic” Factor
Starting from a review of the Orbis Spike hypothesis, this essay by the Anthropocene historian Franz Mauelshagen compares the early modern “Agrarian Acceleration” during the Little Ice Age with the material world of the twentieth century. (...)