The Geomorphology of The Anthropocene: Emergence, Status and Implications

Abstract:

The Anthropocene has been suggested as a new interval of geological time in which the influence of human activities on the Earth’s surface and its geological record dominates over natural processes. A major challenge in demarcating such an interval is that the balance between human-influenced and natural processes varies over spatial and temporal scales owing to the inherent variability both of human activities (e.g. as associated with differing cultural norms and modes of development) and natural drivers (e.g. tectonic activity). Against this backdrop, this paper considers how geomorphology might contribute towards the Anthropocene debate. We focus on how human activities impact on the aeolian, fluvial, cryospheric and coastal process domains, and how evidence of this impact is preserved in sedimentary records. We also consider the evidence for an explicitly anthropogenic geomorphology that includes artificial slopes and other human-created landforms. This provides the basis for discussing the theoretical and practical contributions that geomorphology can make to defining an Anthropocene stratigraphy. It is clear that the relevance of the Anthropocene concept varies considerably amongst different branches of geomorphology depending on the history of human actions in different process domains; for example, evidence of human dominance is more widespread in fluvial and coastal records than in aeolian and cryospheric records. Evidence for an Anthropocene based on geomorphological evidence would therefore inevitably comprise a highly diachronous lower boundary. Even to identify this there would be the need for research that focuses on the disambiguation of human effects on geomorphology and geomorphological signatures using a combination of modelling and new techniques rather than an arbitrary ‘war of possible boundaries’. Furthermore geomorphology should be concerned with processes and landform evolution providing the science in this time of critical geological transition.