The big clock tick
Giles Turnbull
by spelling out a fascinating and rather terrifying theory: that
humanity is not just causing climate change, but that human action is
also bringing a geological era to an end. The Holocene is over.
Welcome to the Anthropocene:
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0807/msg00023.html
This goes against the geology I was taught during my A-levels. Then,
it was emphasised to us how different *geological* time is from
*human* time. The aeons required for geological action to have any
effect on anything are so long that they defy human comprehension.
It was made clear to us, as students, that humanity's recorded history
on earth was the tiniest speck of nothingness, appended to the end of
the unimaginable ages of the Stratigraphic Table. Understanding how
brief humanity's time on earth has been is a bit like understanding
just how tiny our planet is in comparison to space. Never mind the
galaxy, you should try one of these Solar System simulators to really
get your head around how huge the *gaps between the planets* are:
http://troybrophy.com/projects/solarsystem/#saturn
I digress. Another commonly-used means of grasping Geological Time is
to map it to 24 hours:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Earth_Clock_ENG.svg
In which case, the Quaternary Period (of which the Holocene Epoch is
just a small part) began just *17 seconds* ago. The Holocene itself,
10,000 years of relative warmth and stability which made it easy for a
bunch of hairy bipeds to start growing plants and building things,
perhaps just *5 seconds* ago. I'm guesstimating that last number.
Davis says that right now, this year and for the foreseeable future,
we're witnessing the progression from the Holocene to its successor.
Or putting it another way: in terms of that 24 clock, we're seeing the
second hand move one tiny tick forward, *for the first time ever*.
Dunno about you, but I'm one hairy biped who finds the idea ever so
slightly terrifying.