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THE CREATIVE CITY | SM3138

# 11: TUNG PING CHAU GEOLOGY & THE ANTHROPOCENE

**Pictures from Seth Denizen’s Ecology Course, Landscape Architecture, 2013 HKU

Anthropocene

Anthropocene: anthropo- meaning ‘human’ and -cene, meaning ‘new’.

!   “For the first time in history, human activity has made such a significant imprint on the earth’s geology and ecosystems to have created a new historical epoch. This post-Holocene period is unique in that the main causal element in the radical changes in the earth’s biology and geology, are not the great forces of nature, but it is humanity itself. The Anthropocene is an epoch of our own making..if our descendants look back in thousands of years’ time, they’ll see the evidence of our actions written everywhere in the rocks.”

Anthropocene !   Proposed in 2000 by

Paul Crutzen & Eugene F. Stoermer – humanity had entered a new geological epoch

!   Defined as human influence on Earth’s systems

Anthropocene starts when? !   18th Century, industrial revolution

where carbon dioxide increases due to burning of fossil fuels

!   1874 with invention of the steam engine

!   1610- First contact-- the lowest point in a decades-long decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide, measurable by traces found in Artic ice cores. The change in the atmosphere, was caused by the death of over 50 million indigenous residents of the Americas in the first century after European contact, the result of “exposure to diseases carried by Europeans, plus war, enslavement and famine”

!   1950s- Nuclear bomb

Nuclear bombs leave distinct isotopic signatures and geological structures.

“There are now so many of us, using so many resources, that we’re disrupting the grand cycles of biology, chemistry and geology by which elements like carbon and nitrogen circulate between land, sea and atmosphere. We’re changing the way water moves around the globe as never before. Almost all the planet’s ecosystems bear the marks of our presence.”

Non-Human Time

!   How does the Anthropocene change how we think of time and the non-human world around us?

!   What is non-human time? The scale of time is often measured in human life span

!   In the Anthropocene we start to see time, and scales of time, as interactive and significant. Human time comes up against the time scale of geology.

!   The Present expands into multiple concurrent scales of time in crisis: thousands of years of radioactive half-lives, atmospheric carbon, and geological time, to the minuscule units of biophysics, cellular pandemics, and human time.

Tung Ping Chau

!   Some of the youngest rocks in Hong Kong: 40-60 million years old (other parts of HK 160 million years old)

!   Layers on layers of silt stone, sandstone, and mudstone very visible here

!   Sedimentary minerals that floated to the bottom of an ancient salt lake 60 million years ago

!   Rock Time, vs. Human Time

!   One of the longest most undisturbed coral reefs with over 130 species of reef fish, sea urchins, sea stars, sea cucumbrs, cowries & sea slugs.

Tung Ping Chau

!   Evidence in sedimentary layers of Stromatolites, one of the oldest living organism that has ever existed: over 600 million years old

!   Older than Gingko Trees, older than flowers.

! Stromatolites straddle existence between rocks and organisms, or the boundary between geology and biology

Geology on the island !   The only sizeable island in Hong Kong made up of sedimentary rock.

Hong Kong is mostly formed of extrusive igneous rocks, after a series of major volcanoes erupted during the Jurassic Period. Following the volcanic activity, a basin formed in the northeast, with deposition in a brackish lake—producing the siltstones and chert of Tung Ping Chau, which have been dated from the early Paleogene period.

!   Cham Keng Chau (斬頸洲), in the northwest, is a chunk of land that has broken away from the island; the Chinese say it represents the head of a dragon. Another notable rock formation is Lung Lok Shui (龍落水), on the southwestern coast, thus named because it resembles the spine of a dragon entering the sea.

!   At the island's southeastern end are two large rocks known as the Drum Rocks, or Watchman's Tower Rocks (更樓石, Kang Lau Shek) They are 7-8 m seastacks on a wave-cut platform. Lan Kwo Shui (難過水) features a long vertical cliff located along the southern coast, where several caves were formed there as a result of long term wave actions.

Life on the island !   Was a location of smuggling of guns and opium across the

border with Guangdong

!   During Cultural Revolution many people swam across sea to the island

!   During the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong (1941-1945), Ping Chau was used as a logistics base for the supply of military resources, including petrol, to the Chinese army.

!   1,500 people lived here in 10 villages in the 1950s. In 2013 the official number was 8

Explore & Document !   Take immediate left when arrive on ferry pier and walk

along the beach to the end of the island. On this beach it’s difficult to tell if the rocks are 60 million years old or 60.

!   Explore the beach and take pictures or document some of what you find there and speculate on its origins.

!   Head to restaurants for 1pm where we can try some Sea Urchins and have lunch

!   After lunch head to South of the island to Dragons Back and to explore some of the exceptional geology.

!   Document your journey and think of ways you can capture ideas of the anthropocene, and non-human time.