Geological notes and local details for 1:10 000 sheet TM 35 SE (Snape) : part of 1:50 000 sheets 190 (Eye) and 208 (Woodbridge)

This report describes the geology of the 1:10 000 sheet TM 35 NE which is included in the Eye (190) and Woodbridge (208) geological maps. The area was f i r s t surveyed by W Whitaker and W H Dalton as part of the Old Series One-Inch sheet 50 SE published in 1883. The primary six-inch survey of the Snape area was made by J A Zalasiewicz in 1982-3 under the direction of D r W A Read as Programme Manager. Uncoloured dyeline copies of the map can be obtained from the British Geological Survey, Keyworth. The sheet area lies some 10 Km north-east of Woodbridge, Suffolk. Most of the ground is broadly f l a t and lies a t c 20-25 m OD. It is underlain largely by Boulder Clay and given over to arable farming. Boulder Clay is absent from the south-east of the area, where a broad outcrop of Kesgrave Sands and Gravels largely coincides with coniferous forest. The south-eastwards flowing River Alde and its tributaries have incised wide valleys in the central and northern parts of the area. Kesgrave Sands and Gravels and the underlying Chillesford Sand crop out in the valley sides, together with irregular masses of Fluvio-Glacial Sand and Gravel and Boulder Clay. The wide f l a t valley floors are underlain by freshwater and estuarine alluvium, and are given over to arable farming with some pasture. The major settlement is Snape, where The Maltings is now a well-known concert hall. There are two smaller settlements, Tunstall and Blaxhall, and a number of scattered farmsteads

Enter the Anthropocene : an epoch of time characterised by humans

In the first years of the 21st century Earth was being influenced by forces greater than our own and yet as vulnerable. With infinite complacency men and women went to and fro over this globe about their affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. And yet, across the vastness of time Earth viewed the actions of people with increasing despair. And slowly, but surely, she drew her plans against us….. We have borrowed these words, with some poetic licence, from H.G. Wells’ late Victorian science fiction spectacular The War of Worlds. Wells’ carefully crafted opening salvo to his novel contains words prescient in the early 21st century as we face the prospect of rapid change to our climate, and warns us about complacency in the belief of our dominion over nature. Already in the late 19th century many scientists were commenting on the extent of human influence on planet Earth. The Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani (1873) was perhaps the first to moot these ideas. Later, as the 19th century drew to a close the Swede Arrhenius and the American Chamberlain worked out the relationship between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and global warming. Arrhenius suggested that future generations of humans would need to raise surface temperatures to provide new areas of agricultural land and thus feed a growing population. But he could not have conceived of the massive rate of human population increase in the 20th century. In 2002 the Nobel Prize winning scientist Paul Crutzen resurrected the concept of the Anthropocene to denote the ever increasing influence of humans on Earth. The word has now entered the scientific literature as a vivid expression of the degree of environmental change on planet Earth caused by humans (Zalasiewicz et al. 2008 and references therein). For the Anthropocene to become useful though, it needs some quantification. How might an Anthropocene Epoch be unique relative to the Holocene or the Pleistocene epochs that preceded it? What criteria could we use to quantify when the Anthropocene began, and how might future generations of geologists recognise its signal in the rock record? More importantly though, does the term Anthropocene help us to understand the influence of humans on our world and how that affects the environment of the near future

Geological notes and local details for 1:10 000 sheets TM 18 NW, NE, TM 19 SW and SE : (Gissing, Pulham Market, Bunwell Street and Long Stratton) : part of 1:50 000 sheet 175 (Diss)

This report describes the geology of a group of four National Grid 1:10 000 sheet areas, TM 18 NW, NE, TM 19 SW and SE. These fall within the confines of the Diss (175) 1 :50 000 Geological Sheet. The area was first surveyed on the one inch scale by W.H. Dalton in 1880-1883 as part of the Old Series One-Inch Geological Sheet 66, published in 1884. A descriptive memoir was published in 1884. The present 1:10 000 revision survey was conducted by S.J. Mathers and J. A. Zalasiewicz in 1985. Uncoloured dye-line copies of the 1: 10 000 geological sheets may be obtained through the Map Sales Dept., British Geological Survey, Keyworth. The 100 square kilometres of Norfolk described include the villages of Bunwell, Aslacton, Forncett St. Peter, Tharston, Long Stratton, Winfarthing, Gissing, Tivetshall St. Margaret and Pulham Market. One major north-eastwards flowing river, the Tas, dominates the drainage

The Anthropocene

The Anthropocene hypothesis—that humans have impacted “the environment” but also changed the Earth’s geology—has spread widely through the sciences and humanities. This hypothesis is being currently tested to see whether the Anthropocene may become part of the Geological Time Scale. An Anthropocene Working Group has been established to assemble the evidence. The decision regarding formalization is likely to be taken in the next few years, by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the body that oversees the Geological Time Scale. Whichever way the decision goes, there will remain the reality of the phenomenon and the utility of the concept. The evidence, as outlined here, rests upon a broad range of signatures reflecting humanity’s significant and increasing modification of Earth systems. These may be visible as markers in physical deposits in the form of the greatest expansion of novel minerals in the last 2.4 billion years of Earth history and development of ubiquitous materials, such as plastics, unique to the Anthropocene. The artefacts we produce to live as modern humans will form the technofossils of the future. Human-generated deposits now extend from our natural habitat on land into our oceans, transported at rates exceeding the sediment carried by rivers by an order of magnitude. That influence now extends increasingly underground in our quest for minerals, fuel, living space, and to develop transport and communication networks. These human trace fossils may be preserved over geological durations and the evolution of technology has created a new technosphere, yet to evolve into balance with other Earth systems. The expression of the Anthropocene can be seen in sediments and glaciers in chemical markers. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by ~45 percent above pre–-Industrial Revolution levels, mainly through combustion, over a few decades, of a geological carbon-store that took many millions of years to accumulate. Although this may ultimately drive climate change, average global temperature increases and resultant sea-level rises remain comparatively small, as yet. But the shift to isotopically lighter carbon locked into limestones and calcareous fossils will form a permanent record. Nitrogen and phosphorus contents in surface soils haves approximately doubled through increased use of fertilizers to increase agricultural yields as the human population has also doubled in the last 50 years. Industrial metals, radioactive fallout from atomic weapons testing, and complex organic compounds have been widely dispersed through the environment and become preserved in sediment and ice layers. Despite radical changes to flora and fauna across the planet, the Earth still has most of its complement of biological species. However, current trends of habitat loss and predation may push the Earth into the sixth mass extinction event in the next few centuries. At present the dramatic changes relate to trans-global species invasions and population modification through agricultural development on land and contamination of coastal zones. Considering the entire range of environmental signatures, it is clear that the global, large and rapid scale of change related to the mid-20th century is the most obvious level to consider as the start of the Anthropocene Epoch

A Visual Library for the Geosciences

This project developed a digital library of annotated photographs of geological specimens which has been integrated with the Department of Geology's existing Blackboard resources. The library is available 24/7 enabling students to use it for enhanced learning, reference and revision. Images are downloadable to mobile devices (e.g. phones and mp3 players) and can be used for reference by students in the field. Difficulties were experienced with colour balancing in the photographs (which in some cases made the material difficult to recognize) and representing 3D patterns on 2D images. However, the students found the material a useful addition to the online materials and the library could be packaged for distribution outside Blackboard. This will require further, ongoing work

Micropalaeontology reveals the source of building materials for a defensive earthwork (English Civil War?) at Wallingford Castle, Oxfordshire

Microfossils recovered from sediment used to construct a putative English Civil War defensive bastion at Wallingford Castle, south Oxfordshire, provide a biostratigraphical age of Cretaceous (earliest Cenomanian) basal M. mantelli Biozone. The rock used in the buttress – which may have housed a gun emplacement – can thus be tracked to the Glauconitic Marl Member, base of the West Melbury Marly Chalk Formation. A supply of this rock is available on the castle site or to the east of the River Thames near Crowmarsh Gifford. Microfossils provide a unique means to provenance construction materials used at the Wallingford site. While serendipity may have been the chief cause for use of the Glauconitic Marl, when compacted, it forms a strong, almost ‘road base’-like foundation that was clearly of use for constructing defensive works. Indeed, use of the Glauconitic Marl was widespread in the area for agricultural purposes and its properties may have been well-known locally

Anthropocene

The world today is undergoing rapid environmental change, driven by human population growth and economic development. This change encompasses such diverse phenomena as the clearing of rainforests for agriculture, the eutrophication of lakes and shallow seas by fertilizer run-off, depletion of fish stocks, acid rain, and global warming. These changes are cause for concern—or alarm—among some, and are regrettable if unavoidable side effects of economic growth for others

Human bioturbation, and the subterranean landscape of the Anthropocene

Bioturbation by humans (‘anthroturbation’), comprising phenomena ranging from surface landscaping to boreholes that penetrate deep into the crust, is a phenomenon without precedent in Earth history, being orders of magnitude greater in scale than any preceding non-human type of bioturbation. These human phenomena range from simple individual structures to complex networks that range to several kilometres depth (compared with animal burrows that range from centimetres to a few metres in depth), while the extraction of material from underground can lead to topographic subsidence or collapse, with concomitant modification of the landscape. Geological transformations include selective removal of solid matter (e.g. solid hydrocarbons, metal ores), fluids (natural gas, liquid hydrocarbons, water), local replacement by other substances (solid waste, drilling mud), associated geochemical and mineralogical changes to redox conditions with perturbation of the water table and pH conditions and local shock-metamorphic envelopes with melt cores (in the case of underground nuclear tests). These transformations started in early/mid Holocene times, with the beginning of mining for flint and metals, but show notable inflections associated with the Industrial Revolution (ca 1800 CE) and with the ‘Great Acceleration’ at ∼1950 CE, the latter date being associated with the large-scale extension of this phenomenon from sub-land surface to sub-sea floor settings. Geometrically, these phenomena cross-cut earlier stratigraphy. Geologically, they can be regarded as a subsurface expression of the surface chronostratigraphic record of the Anthropocene. These subsurface phenomena have very considerable potential for long-term preservation

Anthropocene: its stratigraphic basis

As officers of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG; J.Z. and C.W.) and chair of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS; M.J.H.) of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), we note that the AWG has less power than Erle Ellis and colleagues imply (Nature 540, 192–193; 2016). Its role is merely advisory — to evaluate the Anthropocene as a formal unit in the geological timescale. Proposals must pass scrutiny by the AWG, the SQS and the ICS before being ratified by the Executive Committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences

Second Anthropocene Working Group meeting

The second meeting of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was held at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, on 24th and 25th November 2015. It took the form of a workshop with 12 members of the working group and numerous archaeologists from the Institute in lively conversation with each other. Discussion was focused on anthropogenic strata and matters of chronostratigraphy. The AWG was set up in 2009 to consider the case for formalizing the term ‘Anthropocene’ in the Geological Time Scale. The working group reports to the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, which sits within the broader framework of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). Unusually for a working group of the ICS, it consists of researchers from a wide variety of Earth Sciences, including archaeology