Abstract The human species has deeply impacted the geology of our planet, our current environmental conditions now being very different from the stable interglacial conditions of the Holocene Epoch, in which human civilization flowered. Hence, a new epoch has been proposed, the Anthropocene, starting in tandem with the mid-20th-century Great Acceleration of population, industrialization, and globalization. One of the clearest measures of human impact on our planet is energy use, as reflected by rapidly increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Through this lens, the large-scale historical patterns of human activity show not gradual change but sudden and massive linked changes to geology and ecosystems. This has been driven by growth of the technosphere, a quasi-autonomous and emergent sphere of human-driven processes that interacts with the other Earth spheres. Consequences include the rapid accumulation of unrecycled waste, increasingly threatening the success of this development and hence of humans too.

Abstract This chapter opens with Earth’s gigantic animals, many of which we only know from museum specimens, not only because of ancient extinction events, but because the megafauna of the Ice Ages were among the first to be widely exterminated by human hunting. This has had profound impacts on the Earth’s ecosystems because of these animals’ important role in controlling vegetation patterns. Island extinctions are covered too, both on land with examples such as the Rodrigues Solitaire bird, and increasingly beneath the sea, with seamount communities now threatened by plans for deep-sea mining. The patterns of the great prehistoric mass extinction events are explored, and it is shown how some extinctions—of the rare velvet worms, for instance—might have an evolutionary impact belying their small numbers. The chapter ends by discussing how some of these worrying trends might be halted, at large scales with rewilding, and also at smaller scales, in our own gardens.

Abstract This chapter discusses the development of technology and how it intersects with the biosphere. Technology was originally ingenious and artisanal, but limited for want of energy and resources. Then, coal, oil, and gas became energy sources. Technology mushroomed into a planet-spanning technosphere, currently parasitizing and diminishing the biosphere, with ballpoint pens and Swan lightbulbs among a myriad of rapidly evolving technospecies. While, as the technosphere develops and proliferates, it now begins to include living machines such as xenobots. The technosphere, while now similarly sized to the biosphere, is far more wasteful of resources. If its evolution is not to cause the Earth to become one giant landfill site, it must quickly become much better at recycling.

Abstract This chapter focusses on how energy intersects with life. The energy of sunlight has sustained life on Earth for billions of years, converted by plants into chemical energy, which in turn, is distributed through Earth’s myriad organisms. Now, humans have become adept at controlling energy sources for their own benefit, both by directing biological production towards themselves through crops and domesticated animals, and by opening up new sources of energy, including the fossilized sunlight of hydrocarbon fuels. One major development was the Haber-Bosch process, to fix (at great energetic cost) nitrogen from the air for the increased biological production that now keeps something like half the world’s population alive, via programmes like the Green Revolution. The Earth’s rapidly growing cities are now enormous energy sinks quite out of balance with natural systems, and the chapter concludes by discussing how they may be brought more into balance with nature.

Abstract This chapter looks into the geographic patterns of animals and plants. It highlights how the Wallace Line and other major biogeographical boundaries were discovered, as marking fundamental divisions between the animal and plant communities of Earth. It describes examples in Earth’s geological past when major communities mixed, as when North and South America joined. And it shows how these fundamental divisions are now dissolving worldwide, on the land and in the oceans, as neobiota or ‘introduced species’ have been transported by human activities, or have followed humans on their globe-trotting travels. This homogenization of life on Earth has reset the trajectory of Earth’s biological history, though also in some instances may help ecosystems cope better with the effects of climate change.

Abstract This chapter explores the livestock living on Earth through the phenomenon of fast-food chains and hamburgers across the world. Cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, and other domesticated animals now far outweigh the Earth’s wild animals, while the many billions of chicken consumed by humans are by far the Earth’s most numerous bird. This unprecedented distortion of the Earth’s food web extends to the oceans, as overfishing has decimated fish populations, and aquaculture—with its own ecological costs—spreads rapidly across the world. The chapter ends by exploring means of relieving this intense ecological pressure, with potential solutions, ranging from eating less meat, to technological solutions for growing more food.

Abstract This chapter focuses on the possibilities of restoring nature. It shows possibilities of cohabitation between the numerous human and rapidly shrinking wild ape populations, such as with the Orangutan Foundation preserving habitat, releasing orphaned orangutans in protected reserves, and promoting education and livelihoods for the locals. Rewilding and restoration need concerted efforts to accommodate natural landscapes and wild animal and plant populations, and to avert a mass extinction. The chapter explores, too, the possibility of building mutualistic ‘garden’ cities and rebuilding marine ecosystems such as those of mangrove and seagrass. For a sustainable future, the human and natural worlds need sensitive and imaginative rebalancing.

Abstract This chapter explores the diversity of life, introducing this through the teeming life found in soil. It traces the history of life, from the origin of all species as the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), some three to four billion years ago. This was a springboard to an astonishing diversity of microbes, revealed by Carl Woese who uncovered their genetic signatures. The much later diversification of multicellular organisms in the sea, and its yet later expansion on to land, have been revealed by palaeontologists, and interpreted through the revolutionary studies of Jack Sepkoski, Stephen Jay Gould, and Mike Benton; possible reasons for their very different patterns of diversification are outlined.

Abstract This chapter focuses on changing human understanding of life on Earth. It traverses the exploration of the Moon, the extinction of Neanderthals, and the hegemony achieved by Homo sapiens. Through observations ranging from Stone Age cave art to the Colosseum’s blood-drenched spectacles, the chapter discusses how human relations to animals seem to have evolved, with increasingly pervasive exploitation of animals and plants for food, power, and pleasure. The chapter then charts how scientific ideas of life of life have developed in biology and geology, from the early ideas of Aristotle and Lucretius, through Buffon and Humboldt, to the development of modern ideas of the biosphere through Vladimir Vernadsky and James Lovelock. Life is recognized as the key ingredient of the complex, self-regulating planet we call Earth.

Modification of ecosystems through the introduction of non-native species (neobiota) is one part of the major human impact on the biosphere. Neobiota are now present worldwide and often significantly outnumber native fauna and flora. In many places they have left a distinctive biostratigraphic record of anthropogenic changes to the biosphere in the 20th century. Few ecosystems have been as severely affected by the arrival of neobiota as San Francisco Bay. Some 234 introduced species comprising up to 97% of individuals and in some places up to 99% of the biomass are known to be present in the bay (Cohen and Carlton, 1998). Among the multitude of neobiotic species established are Trochammina hadai, a benthic foraminifer that is native to Japan and was introduced in 1983 (McGann 2008), and Potamocorbula amurensis, a bivalved mollusc native to the Amur River region of East Asia that was introduced in 1986 (Carlton et al. 1990). Here we present sediment core data showing the arrival and proliferation of T. hadai and P. amurensis in addition to three introduced ostracod species, Spinileberis quadriaculeata, Eusarsiella zostericola and Bicornucythere bisanensis. The introduction of T. hadai is thought to have occurred through ballast water exchange from trans-Pacific shipping, and has produced a major perturbation to the foraminiferal record of San Francisco Bay. Pb-210 radiometric dating has established a high-resolution chronology for the core and analysis of fly ash particles (Rose 2015) emitted from coal-fired power stations allow time horizons, and the chronologies they define, to be correlated to a further 18 cores collected across the bay. This quantifies both the temporal and spatial extent of a human-induced biostratigraphic assemblage of neobiota, one that is correlatable with a biostratigraphic record of changes to ecosystems across the world in the late 20th century.Carlton, J.T., Thompson, J.K., Schemel, L.E. and Nichols, F.H. 1990. Remarkable invasion of San Francisco Bay (California, USA), by the Asian clam Potamocorbula amurensis. I. Introduction and dispersal. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 81-94.Cohen, A.N. & Carlton, J.T. 1998. Accelerating invasion rate in a highly invaded estuary. Science 279, 555-558.McGann, M. 2008. High-resolution foraminiferal, isotopic, and trace element record from Holocene estuarine deposits of San Francisco Bay, California. Journal of Coastal Research 24, 1092-1109.Rose, N.L. 2015. Spheroidal carbonaceous fly ash particles provide a globally synchronous stratigraphic marker for the Anthropocene. Environmental Science & Technology 49, 4155-4162.

The Anthropocene as a concept originated in 2000, suggested by Paul Crutzen in an Earth System science context. Only later was it considered as a putative geological series, including in GTS2012 (Zalasiewicz et al. 2012). This was barely three years after the establishment of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), tasked by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy to examine the Anthropocene for potential inclusion in the GTS and to formulate a definition. In GTS2012 a likely generalised stratigraphic signature was postulated to comprise: a) lithostratigraphic signals, both direct modification of the landscape and indirect influences on sedimentary facies through rapidly modifying drivers; b) sequence stratigraphic signals due to modern sea-level rises, envisaging a near-future marine transgression; c) biostratigraphic signals through increased extinction rates, range changes especially through unprecedented rates of species invasions; and d) chemostratigraphic signals including inorganic and organic contaminants, isotopic shifts of carbon and nitrogen and fallout from nuclear bomb testing. By the time of GTS2020 (Zalasiewicz et al. 2020), not only could specific examples of temporal variations in many of these proxies be demonstrated, but also numerous new proxies, such as inorganic crystalline mineral-like compounds, microplastics, fuel ash and black carbon had been demonstrated and more information was available on the scale of human terraforming of landscape and anthropogenic modification of river systems. Further, the intervening eight years had seen a strengthening of the evidence of climate warming, sea-level rise and ocean acidification. In GTS2012, three levels for the beginning of the Anthropocene were considered: the Early Holocene; the onset of the Industrial Revolution; and the mid-20th century, and only the first option was definitively excluded. GTS 2020 was able to report the findings of the AWG that the Anthropocene represented “geological reality”, was best considered at epoch level, should be linked with the plethora of proxies that initiate or show marked perturbations at around the 1950s and is best defined using a GSSP. In GTS2020, the ongoing task of researching potential GSSP candidate sections for the Anthropocene Series was also outlined and this work is anticipated to be completed by 2022. The eleven current sites encompass diverse environments that will best preserve the extensive range of proxies suitable for characterising the prospective Holocene–Anthropocene transition. All sections will be in borehole/drill cores, most showing annually resolved laminations that can be independently dated radiometrically to confirm a complete succession extending back to pre-Industrial times. The strengths and weaknesses of distinct environments are discussed in GTS2020 for lake deposits, marine anoxic basins, estuaries and deltas, speleothems, glacial ice, coral reefs, trees and peat. The evidence collected already suggests that the Anthropocene may be widely recognised and delineated as a sharply distinctive chronostratigraphic unit reflecting major Earth System change that will have geologically lasting consequences. Zalasiewicz, J., Crutzen, P.J. & Steffen, W. 2012. Chapter 32: The Anthropocene. The Geologic Time Scale 2012. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-59425-9.00032-9 Zalasiewicz, J., Waters, C. & Williams, M. 2020. Chapter 31: The Anthropocene. The Geologic Time Scale 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-824360-2.00031-0

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. How

Newly collected material reveals that the Silurian myodocope ostracods from the Holy Cross Mountains, Poland comprise ten species (one new to science) belonging to four families: Bolbozoidae, Entomozoidae, Rhomboentomozoidae, and Cypridinidae. Biostratigraphic control using graptolites indicates that all three Polish outcrops investigated are of about the same chronostratigraphical level: middle Gorstian, lower Ludlow. The new occurrences in Poland extend the known distribution of several species and reinforce data that show many Silurian myodocope species with wide dispersal. Our new observations on the Holy Cross Mountains material confirm that the occurrences of Silurian myodocopes are mostly associated with pelagic animals and with rocks ranging from mudstone, siltstone or shale deposited in open-or deep-shelf marine settings. The cosmopolitan distribution of these ostracods, coupled with their facies and faunal associations, supports the notion of an ostracod (myodocope) ecological shift from benthic to planktonic habitats during the late Wenlock and Ludlow.

Silicified beyrichiocopid and podocopid ostracods from limestone nodules derived from the middle part of the Ichinotani Formation within the Hida Gaien Terrane of central Honshu Island, Japan, are associated with fusulinid foraminifera that indicate strata of the middle Moscovian (Pennsylvanian, Carboniferous). This is a rare record of ostracods from the Palaeozoic of Japan and the first systematic description of ostracods from the Carboniferous of the Hida Gaien Terrane. The fauna comprises six ostracod species (two new) assigned to the genera Amphissites, Kirkbya, Bairdia, Aechmina and Healdia, and additional material of possible cavellinids. The numerical dominance of ornamented beyrichiocopids such as Kirkbya and Amphissites, along with smaller numbers of smooth podocopids such as Bairdia, indicates an Eifelian mega-assemblage' ecotype (sensu G. Becker), that is typical of mid Palaeozoic shallow marine, high-energy environments in a fore-reef ecosystem.