Scale and diversity of the physical technosphere: A geological perspective

Abstract

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.

Ideal-Type Narratives for Engineering a Human Niche

“…Nowadays, people influence planetary fluxes of matter and energy, linking so profoundly the matters of social, cultural, and political nature with features of the planetary biogeosphere [20,[126][127][128]. Evidently, taking the number of people as a metric, this 'terra-engineering by applied geosciences' qualifies as being rather prosperous; although with negative impacts for some people [23] and with risks for the future [129][130][131].…”

The First Antropocene Utopia

“…Thus, formalizing a new Epoch would be a "political attitude" and not a "scientific decision". This argument is entirely rejected by a large group of researchers for whom not only is there a distinction between the Holocene and the Anthropocene in stratigraphic terms, but also in functional terms (Waters et al, 2016;Zalasiewicz et al, 2016). However, this current of thought has so far not been able to convince the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), made up of 16 sub-commissions, each with 20 votes and steered by an executive committee of only three researchers.…”

Making the case for a formal Anthropocene Epoch: an analysis of ongoing critiques

“…Ford et al (2014) demonstrated how post-Second World War anthropogenic deposits can be mapped in Swansea, Wales, as a distinct lithostratigraphic (but also chronostratigraphic) unit from earlier successions associated with the Industrial Revolution, another striking example being the proposed Teufelsberg formation in Berlin (Zalasiewicz et al 2016b). …”

“…Sediment yield was first enhanced over ~1000 years through landscape change, then decreased dramatically as substantial sediment masses accumulated behind major dams mostly built in the last half-century. The large scale of this sedimentary perturbation, and of the resulting deposits, reflects the order-of-magnitude change of sediment erosion, transport and deposition across the Earth's surface driven by human activities related to agriculture, construction and mineral extraction (Wil kinson 2005, Hooke et al 2012, Zalasiewicz et al 2016b.…”