stratigraphic marker
This surface is planar and horizontal. There's a lineation from upper right to lower left; a record of the prevailing weather; perhaps? Something has lined up the black bits. The surface itself is grus — weathered granite. Now we're getting somewhere!
Underlying all this, on a regional scale, are soils weathered from the deep sea sediments of the Pittman Formation. This grus is evidently not in situ!
Until roughly thirty years ago, this was impoverished and unproductive farmland. It couldn't have paid for the transport of grus on the scale of the roads it now paves. But when the leasehold land was resumed by Government, public resources could.
Wait! What's that? There's a plastic bag weathering out of the compacted surface. Here's where stratigraphy meets hypothesis. If it is improbable that anyone would scratch away at the compacted road surface to bury a plastic bag, then it must be older or contemporaneous with the laying down of the grus!
Alarmingly, here's an evidently 30+ years old piece of plastic garbage, slowly fragmenting and scattering into the environment. This is how we'll be remembered — as stratigraphic markers in the Anthropocene …a.k.a. the Plasticene Epoch.
stratigraphic marker
This surface is planar and horizontal. There's a lineation from upper right to lower left; a record of the prevailing weather; perhaps? Something has lined up the black bits. The surface itself is grus — weathered granite. Now we're getting somewhere!
Underlying all this, on a regional scale, are soils weathered from the deep sea sediments of the Pittman Formation. This grus is evidently not in situ!
Until roughly thirty years ago, this was impoverished and unproductive farmland. It couldn't have paid for the transport of grus on the scale of the roads it now paves. But when the leasehold land was resumed by Government, public resources could.
Wait! What's that? There's a plastic bag weathering out of the compacted surface. Here's where stratigraphy meets hypothesis. If it is improbable that anyone would scratch away at the compacted road surface to bury a plastic bag, then it must be older or contemporaneous with the laying down of the grus!
Alarmingly, here's an evidently 30+ years old piece of plastic garbage, slowly fragmenting and scattering into the environment. This is how we'll be remembered — as stratigraphic markers in the Anthropocene …a.k.a. the Plasticene Epoch.