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.

Across a large proportion of Earth's ice-free land surfaces, a solid-phase stratigraphic boundary marks the division between humanly modified ground and natural geological

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.

S U M M A R YIt is now widely accepted that the rapid extension observed in western Turkey is mainly accommodated by large active normal faults which control the geomorphology. The NE-SW trending Burdur, Acigol and Baklan basins bounded by large faults form a system of half-graben whose orientation is evident in both the topography and the tilting of Neogene sediments adjacent to them.We used long-period Pand SH-waveforms t o determine the source parameters of the two largest earthquakes of the 1971 May 12 sequence that occurred in the Burdur region. The main shock was followed by many aftershocks, which were distributed in a broad zone elongated NE-SW, parallel to the long axes of the basins in the region.Documented surface breaks of the 1971 event suggest that the northwest-dipping faults along the southern margin of the Burdur Basin are those which moved. Well-exposed fault planes are found dominantly to the south of Burdur lake; the surface dips of these faults are greater than that of the NW-dipping nodal plane obtained for the main shock. Combined seismological and geological observations suggest that these faults have listric geometries.

We assess the scale and extent of the physical technosphere, defined here as the summed material output of the contemporary human enterprise. It includes active urban, agricultural and marine components, used to sustain energy and material flow for current human life, and a growing residue layer, currently only in small part recycled back into the active component. Preliminary estimates suggest a technosphere mass of approximately 30 trillion tonnes (Tt), which helps support a human biomass that, despite recent growth, is ~5 orders of magnitude smaller. The physical technosphere includes a large, rapidly growing diversity of complex objects that are potential trace fossils or ‘technofossils’. If assessed on palaeontological criteria, technofossil diversity already exceeds known estimates of biological diversity as measured by richness, far exceeds recognized fossil diversity, and may exceed total biological diversity through Earth’s history. The rapid transformation of much of Earth’s surface mass into the technosphere and its myriad components underscores the novelty of the current planetary transformation.

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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

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