Since the first prehistoric people started to dig for stone to make implements, rather than pick up loose material, humans have modified the landscape through excavation of rock and soil, generation of waste and creation of artificial ground. In Great Britain over the past 200 years, people have excavated, moved and built up the equivalent of at least six times the volume of Ben Nevis. It is estimated that the worldwide deliberate annual shift of sediment by human activity is 57 000 Mt (million tonnes) and exceeds that of transport by rivers to the oceans (22 000 Mt) almost by a factor of three. Humans sculpt and transform the landscape through the physical modification of the shape and properties of the ground. As such, humans are geological and geomorphological agents and the dominant factor in landscape evolution through settlement and widespread industrialization and urbanization. The most significant impact of this has been since the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, coincident with increased release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The anthropogenic sedimentological record, therefore, provides a marker on which to characterize the Anthropocene.

Abstract:A new lithostratigraphy is presented for the Skiddaw Group (lower Ordovician) of the English Lake District. Two stratigraphical belts are described.

Abstract:The deliberate anthropogenic movement of reworked natural and novel manufactured materials represents a novel sedimentary environment associated with mining, waste disposal, construction and urbanization.

Sinkholes usually have a higher probability of occurrence and a greater genetic diversity in evaporite terrains than in carbonate karst areas. This is because evaporites have a higher solubility, and commonly a lower mechanical strength.Subsidence damage resulting from evaporite dissolution generates substantial losses throughout the world, but the causes are only well-understood in a few areas. To deal with these hazards, a phased approach is needed for sinkhole identification, investigation, prediction, and mitigation. Identification techniques include field surveys, and geomorphological mapping combined with accounts from local people and historical sources. Detailed sinkhole maps can be constructed from sequential historical maps, recent topographical maps and digital elevation models (DEMs) complemented with building-damage surveying, remote sensing, and high-resolution geodetic surveys.On a more detailed level, information from exposed paleosubsidence features (paleokarst), speleological explorations, geophysical investigations, trenching, dating techniques, and boreholes, may help to recognize dissolution and subsidence features.Information on the hydrogeological pathways including caves, springs and swallow holes, are particularly important especially when corroborated by tracer tests. These diverse data sources make a valuable database -the karst inventory. From this dataset, sinkhole susceptibility zonations (relative probability) may be produced based on the spatial and temporal distribution of the features and good knowledge of the local geology. Sinkhole distribution can be investigated by spatial distribution analysis techniques including studies of preferential elongation, alignment and nearest neighbor analysis. More objective susceptibility models may be obtained by analyzing the statistical relationships between the known sinkholes and the conditioning factors, such as weather conditions. Chronological information on sinkhole formation is required to estimate the probability of occurrence of sinkholes (number of sinkholes/km² year).Such spatial and temporal predictions, derived from limited records and based on the assumption that past sinkhole activity may be extrapolated to the future, are noncorroborated hypotheses. Validation methods allow us to assess the predictive capability of the susceptibility maps and to transform them into probability maps. Avoiding the most hazardous areas by preventive planning is the safest strategy for development in sinkhole-prone areas. Corrective measures could be to reduce the dissolution activity and subsidence processes, but these are difficult. A more practical solution for safe development is to reduce the vulnerability of the structures by using subsidence-proof designs.

The transformation of the Earth's land surface by mineral extraction and construction is on a scale greater than natural erosive terrestrial geological processes. Mineral extraction statistics can be used as a proxy to measure the size of the total anthropogenic global sediment flux related to mineral extraction and construction. It is demonstrated that the annual direct anthropogenic contribution to the global production of sediment in 2015 was conservatively some 316 Gt (150 km 3 ), a figure more than 24 times greater than the sediment supplied annually by the world's major rivers to the oceans. The major long-term acceleration in anthropogenic sediment flux started just after the Second World War and anthropogenic sediment flux overtook natural fluvial sediment flux in the mid-1950s. Humans are now the major global geological driving force and an important component of earth system processes in landscape evolution. The changing magnitude of anthropogenic sediments and landforms over time are

ABSTRACT:The legacy inherited from anthropogenic processes needs to be addressed in order to provide reliable and up-to-date ground information relevant to the urban environment. The legacy includes holes as well as materials. Their characteristics derive from former quarrying and mining activities, industrial processes creating derelict ground, variably consolidated made ground, and contaminated groundwater and soils. All need to be systematically assessed to inform the planning process and provide the basis for engineering solutions. Site-specific investigation needs to be conducted on the back of good quality geoscientific data. This comes from 'field' survey, remotely sensed data interpretation, soil geochemical sampling, and geotechnical investigation. Three-dimensional characterization of superficial deposits is required to reach an understanding of the potential spatial lithological variability of artificial ground and the geometry of importance surfaces, i.e. the boundary conditions.

Building damage due to subsidence and lateral movement can be caused by numerous mechanisms including mining, dissolution of soluble rocks, shrinkswell of clays and landslides. In many instances, the distribution and severity of the damage caused can be diagnostic of the underlying geological condition and can be used as an aid to geological and geomorphological mapping. Many rigid buildings are sensitive to movement, meaning that careful surveys can delineate fine details which can be compiled to identify broader patterns of mass-movement. This paper discusses how damage has been recorded in the past and presents a unified scheme that is based mainly on UK and Italian practice and which can be applied to most situations. It broadens the existing schemes to include the assessment of damage to infrastructure (such as roads and pavements), which are also sensitive to movements; it also extends the existing schemes to include more serious building damage. In this way it unifies the current, disparate approaches and extends the usage of the semiquantified approach to damage assessment. The damage assessment lends itself to storage in a database that can be interrogated, displayed and interpreted using a Geographical Information System (GIS).In Great Britain, figures from the Association of British Insurers (ABI) posted on the internet indicate that building damage due to subsidence cost about £500 million over the dry summers of 1975-6, and £400 million in 2003(Professional Broking, 2007. Other figures from the ABI (Dlugolecki, 2004) suggest that with the effects of climate change, by 2050 the costs could be as much as £600 million in a normal year and £1.2bn in a bad year (at 2004 prices). This damage is caused by a range of geological problems, including natural subsidence, mining induced subsidence, shrink-swell clays, collapsible soils and landslides. In many cases, the style and severity of damage can be directly related to the nature of the geological event and the distribution of the geological unit responsible. Many man-made structures, especially old buildings with very inadequate foundations, are prone to damage by such movements and as such, they form sensitive recording devices for small amounts of movement. By mapping out the degree and spatial extent of damage, it is often possible to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms and magnitudes of movements causing the subsidence. By repeating the monitoring after an interval of time, it may be possible to understand the evolution of the spatial and temporal aspects of the subsidence and gain a measure both of how the area is evolving and its long-term stability. This paper presents a review of several building damage schemes currently in use, and proposes an amalgamated scheme that can be applied more universally to varied

An essential prerequisite for any engineering or hydrogeological investigation of soluble rocks is the identification and description of dissolution features such as stream sinks, springs, sinkholes and caves. The British Geological Survey (BGS) is creating a National Karst Database that records such features across the country. The database currently covers much of the Carboniferous Limestone, the Chalk and particularly the Permo-Triassic gypsum and halite where rapid, active dissolution has caused significant subsidence and building damage. In addition to the identification of specific karst features, the BGS has created a National Karst Geohazard Geographical Information System (GIS). This has been guided by the National Karst Database and created by identifying all the soluble lithologies from the BGS 1:50 000 scale digital geological map and giving each a score, based on factors including lithology, topography, geomorphic position and superficial cover deposits. This national zonation of the soluble rocks can be used to identify areas where the potential for karstic features to occur is significant and where dissolution features might affect the stability of buildings and infrastructure, or where karstic groundwater flow might occur. Both datasets are invaluable scientific tools that have been widely used to support site investigation, groundwater investigations, planning, construction and the insurance businesses. Word Count 7530 No. References 34 No. Tables 7 No. Figures 8 Abbreviated title: Karst geohazards in the UK Karst features, developed over and within soluble rocks, are a well-known potential geohazard, and can cause significant engineering problems, such as subsidence and irregular rockhead. These can pose difficulties for planning and development and be very costly for the construction and insurance industries. There have been numerous examples of subsidence and infrastructure damage resulting from settlement and or collapse of karst features (Waltham et al., 2005); in extreme cases they can cause properties to collapse and put lives at risk. More commonly, karstic rocks can make ground conditions more difficult, increasing construction costs. Underground cavities can also act as pathways along which hazardous liquid and gaseous contaminants can travel, commonly some distance from their source, thus posing an environmental risk. Databases and maps of karst hazards are important for understanding the severity of the problem, and they constitute useful tools for hazard avoidance that have relevance to planning, engineering, development and the insurance industry. Developers, planners and local government can only operate effectively if they have advance warning about the hazards that might be present and have access to relevant geological information. In the UK, karst is most typically associated with the locally varied limestone successions of Early Carboniferous age, referred to informally as the Carboniferous Limestone, but karst features are also found in a host of other carbonate and evaporite...