Exchange on the Half Life of the Nuclear Age
What are the prospects of living among radioactive substances as military spending on atomic weapons increases and some countries invest in and maintain nuclear power on their paths to “net zero” CO₂ emissions? (...)
How to Read a Changing Earth?
A live annotation of a sediment core from the Searsville Lake uncovered the anthropogenic markers inscribed into this stratigraphic material. (...)
Exhibition: New Natures
Part of State of Nature 2022, the exhibition New Natures: A Terrible Beauty is Born was a proposition to rethink the world as we know it today. (...)
Core Readings: Antarctic Peninsula
Researchers study an ice core from one of the fastest-warming places on Earth—revealing key data on Antarctica’s environmental history. (...)
Core Readings: Crawford Lake
How do different forms of societal organization and land use over the centuries affect the environment on local and planetary levels? (...)
Core Readings: Sihailongwan Lake
Tracing socio-political upheavals and technological change in sediment samples from Sihailongwan Lake in northeastern China. (...)
Core Readings: West Flower Garden Bank Reef and Flinders Reef
A close reading of coral samples from the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean—finding signals of ocean warming and the impacts of offshore oil extraction. (...)
Core Readings: West Flower Garden Bank Reef and Flinders Reef
A close reading of coral samples from the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean—finding signals of ocean warming and the impacts of offshore oil extraction. (...)
Fragments from the White Angst Cli-Fi Read-Along
Recording of a live, read-along event presenting a collage of writing by climate fiction authors from all over the world. (...)
What’s So Micro About Plastics?
What does the Baltic Sea drill core reveal about microplastics and the difficulty of defining their sources? Part of Unearthing the Present in May 2022. (...)
Fingerprints of the Nuclear Age
The seminar examined how the radioactive products of the nuclear age have left their residues in soil, sediment, ice, and biological materials. How is it possible to measure, let alone visualize the invisible, minuscule masses of radiation that escape all sensory data? (...)
Anthropocene Working Group Public Forum
As part of the Unearthing the Present events in May 2022, the public were given the opportunity to ask questions members of the AWG questions about their work. (...)
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. (...)