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FROM THE PLEISTOCENE TO THE ANTHROPOCENE: A story happening to the face of a planet called the Earth

By Catalina Giraldo

February 21, 2017

With this paper, I am exploring one chapter of the history of the Earth that took place during the Quaternary, the last 2.6 million years before the present. This era, divided between the Pleistocene and the Holocene, ends with the last hundred years of our time, with a newborn period of time: the Anthropocene. This story was established through different disciplines and branches of natural and social sciences, but the last part has been built and tell again and again using different ways and inter-crossing disciplines.

To draw this story on a linear timeline, the earth is 4.54 billion years old, since then she has been evolving and many changes on her surface and oceans have been sculpting to create the current shape she has. On her surfaces have hosted different climates, landscapes, species of plants and animals and other life forms. Between all of these species, we the homo sapiens are one of the most successful species with a history of just about 200.000 years, but our last civilization has emerged from industrialization to be almost completely separated from the natural systems of the planet in just hundred years. The Quaternary is the last geological era that was begun with a period of time named the Pleistocene. It was about 2.6 million years ago when started and finished just 10.000 years before present. The Pleistocene recorded different cycles of climate with a marked periodicity and it is very known that glacials and interglacials changed repeatedly and greatly the face of the earth, changes that also brought extinction, speciation and profound transformation in the geographical distribution of plants and animals everywhere (Van der Hammen, 1974). The Holocene instead is the latest part of the Quaternary, considered as well as the last and current interglacial period since 10.000 years ago until 1.950, when Anthropocene started as the current geological period (Waters et. al, 2016).

These glacial–interglacial cycles have been engraved in marine and terrestrial paleoclimate records from around the world. Projects like EPICA and VOSTOC amongst others have focused efforts drilling ice-cores in Greenland and Antartica to understand the global climate history. Thanks to these big pictures we know today that every 100.000 years a big change in temperature happens for about 90.000 years, as well as interglacial periods that last around 10.000 years. Some other cycles have been also determined each 40.000 and 20.000 years but more related to temperature and humidity, at least during the last part of the Pleistocene (NOOA 2017, Van der Hammen & Hoghiemstra, YR). As follows, climate change has been a carver giving shape to species and its distributions, for example, in mountains these cycles pushed species rhythmically along the slopes, opening temporary dispersal pathways or dividing populations of plants and animals into isolated remnants. Connected and disconnected populations of plants and animals created flickering connectivity systems that push species to evolve or disappear. Then, after all this time and transformations, the species of plants and animals that homo sapiens have been witnessing since its appearing about 195.000 years ago, is just a snapshot in time after million of years of change (Flantua & Hoghiemstra 2017; Hoogiemstra et.al. 2006; Scientific America 2005; Van der Hammen 1974).

But different to the Pleistocene and Holocene and the periods before, the Anthropocene describes a recent homo sapiens or modern human story and a new geological era where human actions have a drastic effect on the Earth like the current global warming (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000). The beginning of the Anthropocene is most generally considered to be at 1.800 after Christianity, around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Europe (Crutzen's original suggestion); other potential candidates for time boundaries have been suggested, at both earlier dates (within or even before the Holocene) or later (e.g. at the start of the nuclear age). However, it was published in Science by Waters et. al. (2016) that the Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene. They reviewed anthropogenic markers of functional changes in the Earth system through the stratigraphic record. The appearance of manufactured materials in sediments, including aluminum, plastics, and concrete, coincides with global spikes in fallout radionuclides and particulates from fossil fuel combustion. Carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles have been substantially modified over the past century. Rates of sea-level rise and the extent of human perturbation of the climate system exceed Late Holocene changes. Biotic changes include species invasions worldwide and accelerating rates of plants and animals extinction, since 1970, there has already been a 58% overall decline in the numbers of fish, mammals, birds and reptiles worldwide, according to the WWF's latest bi-annual Living Planet Index, what means that we are already losing species at a rate consistent with a sixth mass extinction event. These combined signals render the Anthropocene stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene and earlier epochs (WWF, 2016).

Furthermore, opposed to changes in climate that may have resulted as part of earth's natural processes, global warming in the Anthropocene is a result of destroying natural landscapes, nature forests and releasing ancient stores of carbon. These alterations we have been making is causing changes in temperature, sea ice extent and carbon dioxide concentrations that can be quickly visualized in the climate time machine (NASA 2017). The oil extraction, hydroelectric construction, mono-agriculture and modern cities or jungle’s cement, can be seen as contributing factors, and a means towards our modern mutant creation. The global warming is not only a consequence of changes in the Earth’s long-range planetary motions but also a result of the land use transformations that we have been strongly accelerating in just a hundred years post-industrialization. As modern humans, our behaviors and habits have contributed to global warming through the carbon footprints, and this process is alerting us in ways that will make us change our habits to return to a balance with the earth and to remember our origins as one more species. As Davis et al. (2015) described: Critical Climate Change is oriented, in this general manner, toward the epistemo-political mutations that correspond to the temporalities of terrestrial mutation. As well, I believe that our civilization is crossing the line between the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. Perhaps, we are already living the ‘Quinary’, a new geological era after Quaternary starting with the Anthropocene, with our fingerprints already made on the layers of history deposited and eroded for million of years. In the Dickinson (2015) words: "Anthropocene is both a metaphysical concept and concrete reality: tomorrow's fossil record will reveal one story only, that on the rise and demise of the human race". In that way, the last years transdisciplinary research with its cross-pollination of art, science, design, media, ecology and different cultural disciplines are developing a critical discussion about the Anthropocene, where the arts and design are playing an active role as agents of communication and change (Anthropocene Agents 2017). As well as Alonso (2015) says: experimental artistic practice emphasizes a new combination of aesthetics and ethics and the ecological and the social can provide interesting models in helping societies adapt to this new territory of the Anthropocene.

There are many study cases about the current massive movement of artists exploring the metaphorical language of Anthropocene. Although, the same movement conceptually started in the 70's like Environmental Art, an expression coined as an umbrella term to encompass eco-art/ecological art, ecoventions, land art, earth art, earthworks, art in nature and even a few other less-common terms (Bower 2010), terms that definitely today are under Anthropocene umbrella concept. To bring some examples for Environmental Art, there are over 150 artists, and close to 22 Scientists & Art/Science collaborative projects, organizations, programs, and residencies focused on this Eco-Art movement (The Greenmuseum 2010), a number that is increasing with Anthropocene movement. Some of the most recent works are Taipei Bienal in 2014- The Great Acceleration: Art in the Anthropocene- where 52 artists participated. They followed the changing status of nature in the light of artificial materials and translates it into a three-act structure, turning the museum into an archeological dig (Dickinson 2015, Lin 2015). Seven billion in 2014, referring to the average population of human beings inhabiting the earth hosted at EACC in Valencia, Spain (Alonso 2015). Dark Ecology project (2014, 2015, 2016) inspired by Timothy Morton’s concept of ‘dark ecology’ and his philosophy of ‘ecology without Nature’. Morton offers a radical criticism of the modernist way of thinking about nature as something outside of us and instead proposes an interconnected ‘mesh’ of all living and non-living objects (Dark Ecology 2017).

Thus, the earth as an alive organism has been walking around the sun closer or further, grading the axes up and down and experiencing different glacial and interglacial periods with a signature marker by CO2, water, plants and animals prints amongst others. As well, the most recent human history has their own record already written on the earth’s surface. A question that follows now "it is how to write a new history with the knowledge and the need to change we have now but also the faster development of technologies to mend this broken balance between the earth and us?".

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