HR: 0800h
AN: PP41B-0551    [Abstracts]
TI: The marine geological record of industrialization
AU: * Ridgwell, A
EM: andy@seao2.org
AF: University of Bristol, School of Geographical Sciences, University Road, Bristol, BS8 1SS, United Kingdom
AB: In the far distant future, what traces of our industrialized civilization could a hypothetical alien visitor to the Earth identify our ever having existed by? Popular perception is of landfills being excavated and species extinctions identified. However, localized terrestrial deposits and loss of only a relatively small proportion of species would be fickle candidates for reliable preservation in the geological record. Rather, the imprint of our current civilization will be seen in a global-scale dissolution-preservation event of carbonate in marine sediments, coupled to a pronounced negative carbon isotopic excursion. This is the geological fingerprint of massive carbon release to the oceans and atmosphere in injunction with the rock weathering consequences of a global warming transient. In this contribution I explore the characteristics of the future marine geological record of industrialization and draw parallels with observations recorded in sediments spanning the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.
DE: 1622 Earth system modeling (1225)
DE: 1625 Geomorphology and weathering (0790, 1824, 1825, 1826, 1886)
DE: 4912 Biogeochemical cycles, processes, and modeling (0412, 0414, 0793, 1615, 4805)
DE: 4948 Paleocene/Eocene thermal maximum
SC: Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology [PP]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting