In this class we took a trip to the remote island of Tung Ping Chau to learn about geology, non-human time, and the Athropocene. How has human actions in our cities effected the world around us?

1. *
THE CREATIVE CITY
| SM3138
# 11: TUNG PING CHAU
GEOLOGY & THE ANTHROPOCENE

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

4. 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.”

5. 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

6. 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.

7. “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.”

8. 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.

9. 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.

12. 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

15. 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.

16. 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

17. 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.