In an article entitled “Anthropocene Time”, Dipesh Chakrabarti discusses some of the differences between human-historical time and the time of geology as they relate to the concept of the Anthropocene. (History and Theory 57, no. 1 (March 2018), pp. 5-32) For Chakrabarti, “…we are passing through a unique phase of human history when, for the first time ever, we consciously connect events that happen on vast, geological scales…with what we might do in everyday life.” (p.6) The Anthropocene requires us to think on the two vastly different scales of time, but the difference is not simply a matter of scale. The debates between various versions of the term entail a constant conceptual traffic between world history and Earth history, between human-centered and planet-centered thinking. In a Perfect example of this kind of connection would be Bill Mcgibben’s claim that a single senator’s (Joe Manchin’s) opposition to the Biden energy plan will be part of the geological record. The extractive industries connect to the catastrophic events of the deep past, and their burning contributes to the catastrophic present.. They are “geologic subsidies to the present day.” (Gavin Bridge)
While the rates of change in Geological time remain significantly slower than the succession of events in historical time, the changing record of rapid climate change and its near-term possibility has erased the image of geological time as essentially an unchanging backdrop to historical events. Through its own dynamics and interactions with the solar system, the Earth is quite capable of generating upheavals, geoscientists remind us, which is precisely why it is possible to identify a sequence of transitions in the Geological Time Scale, within the Anthropocene itself, and the onus is also on us to consider geological strata and planetary upheavals other than those in which humankind is now implicated. But the histories of human civilizations are increasingly coordinated with changing environmental conditions.
Geological time in the Athropocene itself is primarily forward looking — taking account of the half-life of radioactive materials, for example, not to mention possibilities for catastrophic climate change.
But Earth history, as explored by geology, looks back into “deep time” — the age of the earth (4.54 billion years), for instance, the history of life on the planet (3.5 to 4 billion years), or the first appearance of the hominins (6-7 million years ago). The geological concept of the Earth is like a great stone book which records its own history.
The Anthropocene may sell be the brief moment in time where it is still possible to talk as if what we do now might matter and could make a difference in the future. (Renata Tyszczuk) or as Isabelle Stengers puts it, “What is proper to every event is that it brings the future that will inherit from it into a past narrated differently.”
In an essay entitled The Anthropocene monument: On relating geological and human time, Bronislaw Szerszynski describes the Parthenon frieze as bringing together two times that had hitherto been seen as utterly separate: the time of mortals and the time of gods.
Mary Beard has documented the transformations of the Parthenon over the course of the time of mortals, reminding us that the time of the Periclean Parthenon was only a brief moment, and that the image of its ideal “timelessness” is a European construct.
Two times characterize the relation of the temples to the Acropolis rock itself. Szerszynski points out that “The hill that forms the Acropolis is itself a clash of times: in violation of the geological rule of superposition, in which newer layers are formed on top of older layers so that the deeper past is below the more recent past, But in the case of the Acropolis, the top half of the hill is older than the bottom. The base of the hill is part of the general Athens layer of 70 million-year-old Athens schist, the top top part of the hill, however, is composed of a limestone that was formed around 100 million years ago. The rock was formed 120 km to the south, from the shells of marine creatures settling on the floor of what was then the Tethys Ocean. Around 40 million years ago, tectonic forces thrust it northwards, and a thin layer of cataclastic limestone (formed by progressive fracturing and grinding of existing rocks), lies along the along the horizontal fault between the two rock formations that make up the hill. This layer of crushed rock both resulted from and facilitated the sliding of the upper formation over the lower.
By the time that Pericles started to construct the grand new temple complex around 460 BCE, the summit of the Acropolis had also been levelled, the tallest deposits having been truncated and the removed limestone and local soil used to fill the gaps, creating an artificial layer up to 14 m thick that was held in place by the citadel walls. After a mortar bombardment during the Viennese campaign against the Ottoman Empire in 1687, only 80% of the frieze survived, and most of it is now in London, forming part of the contested Elgin Marbles held at the British Museum. “Thus, to the clashing geological times of the Acropolis hill and its crowning anthropogenic ‘made ground’, we can add the clashing times of empire and colonial rule.” European Journal of Social Theory 20(1)
Szerszynski descibes the act of at once separating and relating ontologically distinct modes of time as also often done through monuments – edifices, whether found or made, in which it is felt that different spatial and temporal registers come together in a privileged way.
An Anthropocene technofossil: the forty-six-centimeter-thick "Runit" dome of Portland cement that covers the radioactive material from Bikini and other islands (there were forty-two tests in total on Enewetak Atoll alone from 1948)