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Posts Tagged ‘geology’

Anthropocene dust-up: what it means

Posted in Anthropocene, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , on March 22, 2024 | 1 Comment »

The recent International Union of Geological Sciences decision to reject the proposed “Anthropocene epoch” might seem confusing. Here’s a piece of draft material from my forthcoming book-in-progress, The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds, that attempts to bring the situation up to date. Comments welcome! Please note that the […]

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Through an Anthropo(s)cenic Glass, Darkly

Posted in Anthropocene, Cinema, Climate change, Manifestos & auguries, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 11, 2021 | 1 Comment »

My thinking about the Anthropocenic predicament continues to be informed, even haunted, by Andrei Tarkovsky’s films Solaris and Stalker, along with their literary predecessor novels by (Lviv-born) Stanisław Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, respectively. Two keynote talks I’ve been invited to give this October — one for Ukraine’s Congress of Culture, to take place in […]

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P-N transition, or, toward the Neocene

Posted in Anthropocene, tagged , , , , , , , on March 17, 2019 | 2 Comments »

It’s nice to see archdruid John Michael Greer’s proposal for a “Pleistocene-Neocene transition” get a little traction in the science press — specifically, in a Science Alert article by psychologist Matthew Adams. Greer, whose writings on religion and ecology are respectably out-of-the-box, advocates against the Anthropocene label on the basis that a geological epoch — […]

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Koinocene (or Cœnocene)?

Posted in Anthropocene, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 7, 2018 | 2 Comments »

Peircian thinker Gary Fuhrman has posted an interesting piece on the naming of the Anthropocene, entitled Holocenoscopy. Noting that the word Holocene means nothing more than “entirely recent,” as opposed to the Pleistocene, which means “most recent,” so there’s really nowhere left to go with naming geological periods after their recentness, Fuhrman suggests we look to another […]

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Welcome to the… Meghalayan?

Posted in Anthropocene, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 12, 2018 | 8 Comments »

Geology watchers were more than a little surprised last month to learn that we are living in a new age called the Meghalayan, which apparently began about 4200 years ago. After all the excitement over the Anthropocene, it seems that a rival group of geological stratigraphers — one tasked with naming the sub-parts of the Holocene — has […]

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Skipping an Earthbeat

Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 15, 2018 | 4 Comments »

Reading Bill McGuire‘s 2012 book Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes, I came across this description of the annual “pulse” called an “Earthbeat,” which is supposedly responsible for Earth’s preference for volcanic eruptions between November and April (also known as “volcano season”): rather like a beating heart, the Earth changes […]

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The Orbis spike

Posted in Anthropocene, tagged , , , , , , on March 24, 2015 | Leave a Comment »

In an article in Nature entitled “Defining the Anthropocene,” geographers and climate scientists Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin provide a new approach to dating this era that focuses on an event they call the “Orbis spike,” a dip in atmospheric CO2 occurring around 1610. Effectively, what their proposal does it to allow geologists to harmonize their work […]

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Anthropocene: Too serious for postmodern games

Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Philosophy, Science & society, tagged , , , on August 18, 2014 | 6 Comments »

The following is a guest post by Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, Australia. It continues the Immanence series “Debating the Anthropocene.” See here, here, and here for previous articles in the series. (And note that some lengthy comments have been added to the previous post by Jan Zalasiewicz, Kieran […]

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Anthropocene debate continues

Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, tagged , , , on August 5, 2014 | 10 Comments »

Kieran Suckling’s post Against the Anthropocene, originally posted here on July 7 and subsequently shared with the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s Anthropocene Working Group by Andy Revkin, has elicited a round of emailed back-and-forths from some noteworthy individuals, including paleobiologist Jan Zalasiewicz and paleoecologist Anthony Barnosky. As this debate would be of interest to readers of this […]

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