The Anthropocene - an artist's rendition

We have already reported on the Anthropocene in this blog. The idea that we might be moving things in future deep time is inspiring and disturbing at the same time. The Haus der Kulturen der Welt has initiated a project working on cultural aspects of the Anthropocene, the "Anthropocene Project". The project is coming to a close now. The symposium of its working group will be broadcast live on Friday, 17 October 2014 starting from 0900 CET. The project put together an impressive lineup of speakers.

"Human Impacts and Their Consequences - A Forum on the Occasion of the First Meeting of the Anthropocene Working Group"

Friday, 17 October 2014 starting from 0900 CET


Programme and webcast can be accessed here.

Welcome to the Anthropocene

In its current issue, The Economist has published an interesting piece on "The Anthropocene - A man made world". In terms of public understanding of science it gives an interesting insight into how stratigraphy works, how palaeontology and geochemistry are used to define stratigraphical ages. It also looks at earth system science and on the interplay of human activity, climate and ocean chemistry.
Even though I do not agree with some of the suggestions on terraforming, it is the first time that I had the concept of "carbonate compensation depth" explained to me in a mainstream news magazine. I also found the example of the preservation of the ruins of a city on a fast sinking river delta highly original.

Stratigraphic concepts and agetagging

Stratigraphic 'homonyms' are quite common, a result of ambiguous placenames which have been used to name stratigraphic units. The stratigraphic terms used in Jens' post on Table Mountain stratigraphy nicely illustrate this:
He wrote about the South African 'Peninsula Formation' which is a synonym for the 'Peninsula Sandstone'. Unfortunately, this 'Peninsula Formation' is homonym to the 'Peninsula Formation' from British Columbia. The latter is of Cretaceous age, whereas the South African was formed during the Ordovician!

Geoscientists using stratigraphic terms surely have a clear concept of what they mean. However, whereas for human readers it may be easy to determine such a concept by lithological descriptions or the broader geological or tectonic context, this is much harder for computer algorithms and thus, agetagging.
Fortunately, the regional context can easily be discovered by geotagging technologies, therefore the geographic concept of a stratigraphic term is most important. Stratigraphic homonyms may exist at much lower regional level, e.g. from different provinces or states and most likely there are also significant conceptual differences between scientists. etc etc. However, such regional concepts are sufficient for the approximation for our agetagging purposes. The concept of a South African 'Peninsula Formation' is surely completey different from the Canadian.

.. a lot of complications with 'strato-semantic' text analyis.. stratigraphic analysis of geoscientific texts requires a combined approach, good agetagging is not possible without geotagging.