GEOLOGY HOMEWORK ASSIGNMNET - Essay Example

GEOLOGY HOMEWORK ASSIGNMNET Two ways in which human activity could be detected by future stratigraphers are, firstly, by examining layers of rock formations or soil sediments which contain or rather preserve in them clues about previously existing life forms and their activities. And secondly, the more direct way is by studying fossils of life forms on earth which remain embedded in the rocks of the earth’s crust and which contain information about the life forms embedded in them. Humans have impacted the earth tremendously, like no other previous life form and the impact is bound to be preserved for the discovery of future stratigraphers, although whether the discoveries would reflect positively or negatively on the human race of today, is hard to tell.

Until recently, it was accepted that we live in the Holocene epoch which began at the end of the last ice age. However, the Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene epoch. The Anthopocene epoch can be considered to have begun sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. This is because, human impact upon the world has grown much more prominent since the last century and continues to do so with the human population being quadrupled in this period and the human biomass already being much larger than that of any species that ever existed on earth.

The concept of a new epoch after the Holocene epoch was first introduced by an Italian geologist named Antonio Stoppani in 1870, but was rejected as unscientific. Since then however the human impact on earth has grown by immense standards and thus the Anthropocene epoch can be said to have begun after the late 19th century. I do support the concept of the Anthropocene epoch primarily because along with the increase in population, the impact of technology on the earth cannot be overlooked. With the kind of structures, waste matter, pollution, environmental degradation that we have contributed, it cannot be denied that we have indeed entered a new geological epoch in the history of the Earth.

Works Cited Kolbert, Elizabeth. “Enter the Anthropocene—Age of Man” National Geographic, March 2011.