Archives for February 2008

Designer 1:  Did you see the Oscars last night? 

Designer 2:  No, how was it? 

Designer 1:  I didn't watch it. 

from here

They say that geological time is a very long sort of time.  In fact, if geological time was a day, recorded history has only been two and a half seconds. 

(from here)

And given that the industrial age has only been a small fraction of recorded history, I found it pretty amazing that we've so drastically altered the Earth that scientists are considering the idea that we may have created a new geological epoch. 

“The
dom­i­nance of huma­ns has so phys­ic­ally changed Earth that there is
in­creas­ingly less jus­tifica­t­ion for link­ing pre- and
post-in­dus­tri­al­ized Earth with­in the same ep­och,” the
re­search­ers said in an an­nounce­ment of their pro­pos­al.

The tra­di­tion­al name for our cur­rent ep­och—soon to be­come the
form­er one, if they have their way—is the Hol­o­cene. The Hol­o­cene
has spanned the last 10,000 years and fol­lowed the Pleis­to­cene,
com­monly called the Ice Age.

The
re­search­ers at the Un­ivers­ity of Leices­ter, U.K. and the
Ge­o­log­i­cal So­ci­e­ty of Lon­don said human im­pact on Earth is
show­ing in ma­ny ways: changed ero­sion pat­terns; ma­jor
dis­tur­bances to the car­bon cy­cle; global warming; whole­sale   
changes to plant and animal life; and ocean acidification. 
 
Al­though ge­ol­o­gy is mainly the study of Earth’s rocks, soil and phys­ical struc­ture—rather than an­i­mals and life forms as such—all these fac­tors can ul­ti­mately in­flu­ence that struc­ture, re­search­ers say.   
Man’s al­tera­t­ions to Earth are “strati­graphic­ally sig­nif­i­cant,” the group said in the an­nounce­ment.

So welcome to the An­thro­po­cene epoch. Whoops.  Our Bad…

Or maybe its more like: "In Soviet Russia, Geological Epochs create new YOU!"