Trump, Poutine, Brexit… Le scénario catastrophe d'un cataclysme historique est en marche Nous venons d’entamer un nouveau cycle de catastrophes historiques et, comme d’habitude, nous allons garder la tête dans le sable jusqu’à ce qu’il soit trop tard. L’auteur et chercheur Tobias Stone, archéologue, historien et auteur, invite, dans un article publié en juillet dans Medium.com, à prendre un peu de recul sur toutes les catastrophes isolées qui sont en train de nous tomber dessus. De l’autre côté de l’Atlantique, Trump. Ici, le Brexit. Tobias Stone prend l’exemple de la Première Guerre mondiale: en juin 1914, personne ne se doutait qu’un micro-événement tel que l’assassinat d’un archiduc autrichien déclencherait un processus débouchant sur la mort de 17 millions de personnes. Or, l’histoire humaine est faite de cycles catastrophiques qui se répètent inlassablement. «Après la guerre qui devait mettre fin à toutes les guerres, nous en avons eu une autre» Nous voilà au seuil du prochain enfer de l’histoire, sans doute l’avons-nous même déjà franchi. Scénario de la catastrophe
Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever | Books In 2003 the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia to mean a “form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change”. Albrecht was studying the effects of long-term drought and large-scale mining activity on communities in New South Wales, when he realised that no word existed to describe the unhappiness of people whose landscapes were being transformed about them by forces beyond their control. He proposed his new term to describe this distinctive kind of homesickness. Where the pain of nostalgia arises from moving away, the pain of solastalgia arises from staying put. Albrecht’s coinage is part of an emerging lexis for what we are increasingly calling the “Anthropocene”: the new epoch of geological time in which human activity is considered such a powerful influence on the environment, climate and ecology of the planet that it will leave a long-term signature in the strata record. The idea of the Anthropocene asks hard questions of us.
Geochronology | Earth science | Britannica Geochronology, field of scientific investigation concerned with determining the age and history of Earth’s rocks and rock assemblages. Such time determinations are made and the record of past geologic events is deciphered by studying the distribution and succession of rock strata, as well as the character of the fossil organisms preserved within the strata. Earth’s surface is a complex mosaic of exposures of different rock types that are assembled in an astonishing array of geometries and sequences. Individual rocks in the myriad of rock outcroppings (or in some instances shallow subsurface occurrences) contain certain materials or mineralogic information that can provide insight as to their “age.” For years investigators determined the relative ages of sedimentary rock strata on the basis of their positions in an outcrop and their fossil content. Get exclusive access to content from our 1768 First Edition with your subscription.
Human impact has pushed Earth into the Anthropocene, scientists say | Environment There is now compelling evidence to show that humanity’s impact on the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and wildlife has pushed the world into a new geological epoch, according to a group of scientists. The question of whether humans’ combined environmental impact has tipped the planet into an “Anthropocene” – ending the current Holocene which began around 12,000 years ago – will be put to the geological body that formally approves such time divisions later this year. The new study provides one of the strongest cases yet that from the amount of concrete mankind uses in building to the amount of plastic rubbish dumped in the oceans, Earth has entered a new geological epoch. “We could be looking here at a stepchange from one world to another that justifies being called an epoch,” said Dr Colin Waters, principal geologist at the British Geological Survey and an author on the study published in Science on Thursday. “We [the public] are well aware of the climate discussions that are going on.
Alain Damasio Alain Damasio écrit de la science-fiction comme d’autres lancent des pavés : dans le but de trouver, parfois à tâtons, quelques sentiers hors du désastre. Ses deux livres les plus connus, La Zone du Dehors et La Horde du Contrevent, ont redonné au conte philosophique une actualité sans niaiserie, et nourri l’imaginaire d’une génération plutôt que son désespoir. Illustration Jérémie Masson Dans un numéro précédent, nous avions publié la vidéo suivante, dans laquelle Alain Damasio contribuait à l’abécédaire de la ZAD. Il nous livre cette semaine sa vision d’un monde sans Macron. Altistes et Solistes Dans nos villes soumises à la prédation privée, les espaces encore libres se trouvent sur les toits et sous les sols : Altistes et Solistes s’en emparent pour les mettre en commun et faire sonner, tels riffs, les cordes intenses qui nous lient . Parti de France, le mouvement fait des petits partout en Europe, porté par la crise du logement. Gang anarchitecte « Étranger, ici on aime les étrangers »
Historicizing the Anthropocene: A Peek at Paris | Inhabiting the Anthropocene Historians love questions of dating and chronology, and there are two questions about dating the Anthropocene. First, stratigraphy and other sciences have been searching for physical evidence for when measurable, large-scale, human-driven environmental change began. Common landmarks include the Neolithic, industrial, and nuclear eras. Second is the question of when humans became aware of large-scale anthropogenic environmental change, a question for cultural and intellectual history. In his Epochs of Nature (1778), the Comte de Buffon wrote “The entire face of the Earth today bears the imprint of human power,” so we know that this awareness dates at least to the 1700s.1 My own research deals with urban environmental history, and I am completing a book manuscript entitled The Fragility of Urban Modernity: Space, Technology, and Nature in Paris, 1870-1914. One major project Bechmann worked on was removing a polluted river, the Bièvre, from Paris’s landscape.
Holocene epoch | Causes, Effects, & Facts | Britannica The Holocene is unique among geologic epochs because varied means of correlating deposits and establishing chronologies are available. One of the most important means is carbon-14 dating. Because the age determined by the carbon-14 method may be appreciably different from the true age in certain cases, it has been customary to refer to such dates in “radiocarbon years.” Increasingly, however, as calibration data sets have become available, dates in radiocarbon years are being directly converted to calendar years. These dates, obtained from a variety of deposits, form an important framework for Holocene stratigraphy and chronology. Get exclusive access to content from our 1768 First Edition with your subscription. Radiocarbon years are calculated by examining the radioactive decay of carbon-14. The limitations of accuracy of radiocarbon age determinations are expressed as ± a few tens or hundreds of years. In certain areas a varve chronology can be established.
The Anthropocene epoch could inaugurate even more marvellous eras of evolution | Martin Rees | Environment On Christmas Eve 1968, the Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders took a photograph of the view outside the window as his spaceship orbited the moon. The now iconic Earthrise image shows our half-moon blue planet under a decoration of clouds rising from the blackness of space over the lunar surface. The picture encapsulated Earth’s precariousness in the cosmos and, for many, contained a message of humility and stewardship for our home. We’ve had Earthrise and images like it from the Apollo missions for half a century now. But suppose some aliens had been viewing our planet for its entire 4.5bn-year history. Over nearly all that immense time, changes would have been very gradual: continents drifted; the ice cover waxed and waned; successive species emerged, evolved and became extinct during a succession of geological eras. But visible change has accelerated rapidly in the past few thousand years – a tiny sliver of the Earth’s history. What do these trends portend?
"Il est déjà trop tard" : l'espèce humaine devrait s'éteindre ce siècle - notre-planete.info Et s'il n'y avait plus rien à faire pour sauver l'humanité ? S'il était déjà trop tard ? C'est l'opinion du défunt scientifique australien Frank Fenner mais aussi de Stephen Hawking qui recommande de coloniser d'autres planètes. Pour eux, nous avons déjà scellé le destin de l'Humanité : dans moins de 100 ans, les sociétés humaines ne seront plus... Dans une interview accordée au quotidien national The Australian, et publiée le 16 juin 2010, Frank Fenner[1], professeur émérite de microbiologie à l'Université nationale australienne, prédit la disparition de l'Humanité dans les 100 prochaines années. Ce mauvais augure pourrait prêter à sourire, mais le scientifique mort à 95 ans[1] a une carrière impressionnante : Membre de l'Académie des sciences australienne et de la Royal Society, son travail a été récompensé par de nombreux prix et il est l'auteur de centaines de textes scientifiques. De quoi inspirer confiance, ou au moins de l'intérêt pour ses déclarations. "Nous allons disparaître.