On Thursday 8th October (early hours of Friday 9th for us in the UK!) I had the honour and the privledge of finally, finally, giving a Odd Salon talk! Before I get to my talk… What’s ‘Odd Salon’, you say?
“Odd Salon has been bringing curious minds together for live salons over cocktails, encouraging both experts and amateurs to take the stage and explore extraordinary and unusual chapters from history, science, art, and adventure…”
Under normal circumstances, the quirky, weird, but very popular talks take place monthly in San Francisco and New York City. The crowd don’t just sit and listen, they are encouraged to get cordially rowdy and a little drunk. At the end of each talk, the speaker gives a toast to cap off the story. Visit Odd Salon’s YouTube channel to see recordings of the amazing presentations! If you like quirky and strange stories about the world, its history and the lives that occupy it, then you should check it out.
Odd Salon “CURIOSITY” – 6th February 2018 at Public Works, San Francisco, CA
I toyed with the idea of proposing a talk myself, but I would have needed to be accepted for a time I would be in San Francisco (or New York, but more likely the former). However, since during the Coronavirus pandemic Odd Salon has gone online. And that gave the opportunity for an Odd Salon fellow to approach me to be their first international speaker! Eeep!
So here it is! The recording here, with a full article with embedded references below it. Enjoy.
The Anthropocene: Does Arrogance Outlast Decay?
The “Anthropocene” – a unique period of Earth’s history in which humans are one of the dominant forces of nature. But the debate is still feverish whether we should be formally designating the current period of history with this term. And perhaps one of arrogance, too. Are we having such a profound impact on our planet that when, not if, decay sets in, our mark will be forever present?
The concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ has been around amongst scholars for over 150 years. but it was Soviet mineralogist and geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky who, in the 1920’s, first pioneered the thought that living organisms could reshape the planets as “surely” as any physical force. He was a man who was so dedicated and passionate to the synergetic, transcendent and collaborative nature of science despite the dramatic historical events of the early 20th century that impacted his everyday life. On top of this, his work was largely dismissed by the West until decades later, but it is now recognised that Vernadsky was a pioneer for many concepts that make up what we know today as ‘Environmental Sciences’. Scientific controversy over out impact on the Earth was true then as it is now.
Fast forward to 2011, and this quote: “It’s a pity we’re still officially living in an age called the Holocene…” said a Nobel Prize for Chemistry winner “…The Anthropocene – human dominance of biological, chemical and geological processes on Earth – is already an undeniable reality.” This quote to me, is academic in nature, but does have a tone of arrogance to it. This Nobel laureate had a rather fiery outburst at colleagues during a meeting in 2000 – the constant use of the word ‘Holocene’ was apparently making his blood boil!
This passion and ‘arrogance’ came from Dutch chemist Paul J. Crutzen (right). Months later, Crutzen teamed up with American biologist Eugene Stoermer, and expanded on the idea – the popularisation of the concept began.
How does the Anthropecene fit into deep geological time?
But let’s leave the origin story and turn to context. Let’s take the monument-in-progress of Crazy Horse in South Dakota, and use his stretched-out arm and extended pointing index finger for scale. If Earth’s lifespan, all 4.5 billion years of it, was the length of Crazy Horse’s arm and Earth was born at his armpit, then it’s not until you get to the knuckles that the Phanerozoic Eon (542ma) began with the Cambrian explosion and trilobites!
Dinosaurs roamed the Earth on the upper index finger, ending in the infamous meteor 65ma that saw their demise. This is the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event. Humans have only been around for the distal (free-edge) of the fingernail, and us trolling the Earth in epic arrogant scale has been microscopic in terms of time. So the ‘Anthropocene’ could be seen as a very arrogant claim in terms of deep time. Has our impact already been so profound? Bear in mind that the next time you bite your nails (as I do too often), you’ve just erased all of human history!
What of Human arrogance might linger?
Ok, I’m a huge sci-fi and fantasy fan. So indulge me on a thought experiment here popularised by the 2009 book “The World Without Us” by Alan Weismann. First… SPOILER ALERT for Avengers: Infinity War…
Let’s say Thanos decided to use the infinity stones to rid the Earth of ALL human life instead of half of it, leave all else untouched. Then what of our arrogance might endure? What might take longest to decay?
The Channel Tunnel, or “Chunnel” which connects England and France is built within the rock under the English Channel. It may remain passable for a while to allow migrating animals, until sea level rise floods the French end. Continental movements after millions of years would be the death knell for it. It tickles me to think that it would grate Nigel Farage, Brexit stalwart, to learn that this physical legacy of joining Britain to Europe will long outlast his efforts to separate the UK from the EU.
Everyday stainless-steel items, such as… nunchucks… odor bars to get rid of that pesky sulphur… and chainmail gloves… could last millions of years if they ended up buried and fossilised.
Mount Rushmore in South Dakota (right) is carved out of granite with intrusions of pegmatite, exceptionally resistant to weathering, eroding only one inch every 10,000 years. Noses disappear within 2.5 million years. Heads lose their definition around 7,000,000 years. Typical, and the epitome of privilege, that a monument to a bunch of white, cisgender, old dudes would last for so long.
But an attempt to ‘decolonize’ that would be the monument to Crazy Horse, also made out of pegmatite granite. Being larger and more defined than Rushmore, let’s get Crazy Horse finished before Thanos snaps his fingers, so it would outlast the colonials.
And I know, I’m cheating here, but the human artefact that is most likely to last into the billions of years is within an environment lacking the agents of weathering and erosion. Our activity on the moon will last except in the unlucky event of a direct meteor strike!
I haven’t covered the ‘usual subjects’ of human artefacts that will be contained in a geological record. Atmospheric carbon, petrochemicals, and mass extinction get enough coverage as it is, so let’s focus on the root of these; human arrogance.
Does arrogance cause decay?
Flipping the title of this talk, let’s ask does arrogance cause decay, and look at the Anthropocene not as a geological era itself, but more like an event, like the meteor that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and the K-Pg geological boundary. That event has its fallout showing up as a small layer of deposits, like here by Interstate 25 in southern Colorado – with a handy Swiss Army knife for scale.
Sticking with scale, currently we’re trolling the Earth on one of Crazy Horse’s distals. But how does the ‘Anthropocene’ compare in terms of time-scale to say the K-Pg boundary? If I make those lines representing these events a certain thickness to match their time-scale, then this is what they look like.
Various start dates for the Anthropocene have been proposed; lets be generous and go from the earliest estimate of the Agricultural Revolution of 15,000 years. And for the K-Pg boundary, we’ll use deposits in the Denver Basin that shows that the interval between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the appearance of earliest Cenozoic mammals was around 185,000 years. In other words, the last extinction event lasted roughly 12 times longer than our current influence on this planet.
The K-Pg event caused ¾ of life of plant and animal species on Earth to go extinct, but like extinction events before it, life recovered and led to an explosion in ‘evolution’ and diversity, filling niches left by the dead. 90% of mammal species were snuffed out by the asteroid, but they recovered and then some within just a few 100,000’s of years, they went on to evolve into horses, whales, bats and our primate ancestors. So, what might life look like after the decay brought on by our trolling activity?
It will be life, but not as we know it…
Well, there will be life, but to quote Spock from 1987’s pop song ‘Star Trekkin’!’, “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it!” Now of course we have no way to know for sure, but some educated guesses based on science, formed part of a wonderful 2019 BBC Future article. And of course, being British, I love a bit of Aunty Beeb. So, get your head around these possibilities…
If hotter, drier conditions persist in the future due to climate change, then “Larger animals might evolve things like extended sails or skin flaps that they could extend out in the early morning to try to capture moisture.” to quote Patricia Brennan, an evolutionary biologist. “The frilly collars of some lizards, for example, could become very large and exaggerated to gather water in this way.” So, here’s a my mock up… The frilled-necked lizard from New Guinea & Australia, plus fog harvesting nets in Peru equals.. the fog-net-necked lizard!?
You may, or may not, have heard of the 19th century hoax of the Madagascar ‘man-eating tree’ or the myth of the Yateveo, the latter being a carnivorous tree with huge poisonous spines? Today, the ‘walking palm tree’, native to Central and South America already exists, and so does the more well-known venus fly-trap. Who knows with a million or so years of evolution?
Indulge me one more time… With potential long-term disruption to habitats, there may be a necessity for species to ‘habitat switch’. “Consider a toad whose gullet swells outward as a large gasbag used to make mating calls”. Now what if that toad evolved to be able to fill its gasbag with hydrogen, taken from water allowing it to hop further or even float? So there’s no longer a need for legs, they become tentacles over time. And through natural selection, the toads become bigger to survive predators. A Zeppelinoid! suggests Peter Ward, a palaeontologist at the University of Washington. Zeppelinoids become predators themselves, ensnaring their prey in their tentacles. A deer has been added for scale!
I began with a quote from Crutzen, which, on behalf of humanity, has a tone of arrogance. But to end I will return to Vladimir Vernadsky who in 1945, the year of his death, said: “The whole of mankind put together represents an insignificant mass of the planet’s matter. Its strength is derived not from its matter, but from its brain. If man understands this, and does not use his brain and his work for self-destruction, an immense future is open before him in the geological history of biosphere.” A warning to humanity, of their arrogance.
Life will go on after decay, whether it be mass-extinctions from geological upheaval, asteroid strikes or sheer bloody arrogance. And so I would like to give us a little ‘hope’ with a toast. And that is we may feel like the events of “today” is causing decay in some form or another, and what comes next may be inconceivable or uncertain. But what appears to be inevitable is that from decay comes rebirth, and an explosion of diversity and evolution. Here’s to what comes next. Cheers.
Acknowledgements
Massive thanks to Odd Salon Fellows Christopher Reeves and Kate O’Donnell. Christopher was assigned to me as my mentor for my very first (and hopefully not last) Odd Salon talk. He is a ‘top bloke’ (as we say in the south of England!) and I really hope to work with him again in the future. You can check out some of his Odd Salon contributions via YouTube. For my followers, Kate O’Donnell is a name you have heard before, as she is also a member of staff at the Exploratorium. Kate is the curator of ‘Odd Salon DECAY’, which is a residency for the Exploratorium’s After Dark this month. It was her invitation, support and encouragement that got me on board!
References:
- “Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky and his Revolutionary Theory of the Biosphere and the Noosphere” (Irina Trubetskova) via http://www-ssg.sr.unh.edu/preceptorial/Summaries_2004/Vernadsky_Pap_ITru.html.
- The Guardian Long Read: The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history? (30th May 2019) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/30/anthropocene-epoch-have-we-entered-a-new-phase-of-planetary-history
- The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (2009) ISBN: 978-0-312-34729-1
- The Geological Society: Channel Tunnel via https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/GeositesChannelTunnel
- US National Park Service: Mount Rushmore – Park History: Carving History (archived webpage, accessed September 2020) https://web.archive.org/web/20061010135902/http://www.nps.gov/archive/moru/park_history/carving_hist/carving_history.htm
- Clyde et al. (2016) Direct high-precision U–Pb geochronology of the end-Cretaceous extinction and calibration of Paleocene astronomical timescales, Earth and Planetary Science LettersVolume 452, 15 October 2016, Pages 272-280 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2016.07.041)
- “Mammals almost wiped out with the dinosaurs” (University of Bath, Press Release 20th June 2016) via https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/mammals-almost-wiped-out-with-the-dinosaurs/
- BBC Future – Strange evolution: The weird future of life on Earth via https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190715-strange-evolution-the-weird-future-of-life-on-earth
Thank you! All my education work via the Geogramblings’ “Life Geographic” blog is done all in my spare time, at my own cost but is free for you to access and enjoy. If you can spare a few pence, I’d be delighted if you could show your thanks by ‘buying me a coffee‘.
Geogramblings 
Reblogged this on Geogramblings and commented:
Given the recent news about the calls from scientists to officially recognise that we’ve moved into a new geological epoch, the ‘Anthropocene’, it seemed like a fitting time to repost this blog and video that I wrote for US-based Odd Salon. It’s quirky, silly, but definitely gives you food for thought! Watch out for the giant zepellinoid, everyone!
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