patterns of historic human-caused erosion

A flooded Columbia State Historic Park, December 2010.  The erosion caused by gold mining in the 1850s to 1870s extensively shifted the drainage patterns in the region, leading to flooding, which in this case acts as an agent of further human-caused erosion. 

I am pretty enthusiastic at the geologic direction being taken by certain segments of the architecture/built environment/landscape blogs, leading up to the "Landscape Futures Super Workshop" Bldgblog put on recently in Los Angeles (see also Friends of the Pleistocene's work on the Geologic City  for more of this long-view exploration of the geologic origins of the built environment).  The geologic space of the contemporary city is a fascinating and highly relevant direction for geographically-minded artists and scholars to turn.  While not directly infrastructural nor relevant to digital communication or the spaces of mobile connectivity, I am posting below some research I have been doing on anthropic geomorphology, human-caused erosion.

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As earth moving and manipulation technologies have evolved, humans have gone from hunting and gathering, to using iron ploughs, to industrial agriculture, and from walking footpaths to commuting on continent-spanning freeway systems.  Humankind’s impact on global-scale geomorphology has grown with the exponential population gains.  The rates of anthropic erosion that are a by-product of modern, global living now greatly exceed rates of natural soil formation.  Anthropogeomorphology has over the last century attempted to quantify the extent of human-induced earth change.  More recent scholarship has attempted to predict future change.  Since humans are now the primary agent of geomorphology, the global scale and short time-frame of change will be as damaging to humanity’s long-term survival as global climate change.

Below is a review section of recent and not-so recent scholarship into anthropogeomorphology.

HISTORIC HUMAN-CAUSED EROSION

Although the extent of anthropogenic geomorphology has grown enormously since the Industrial Revolution, it is a process that has occurred since the Paleolithic period 1,000,000 years ago.  The first anthropogeomorphic activity was the making of seasonal shelters from rock through the moving of boulders for the walls, and “foundations and floors from small rubble” (Hooke 2000, 843).  Constructing rock shelters was most likely the only major anthropogeomorphic activity until “ten thousand years ago, in the late Paleolithic, [when] humans quarried flint” (Hooke 2002).  This need for flint for stone tools initiated the first instances of mining (Hooke 2000, 843). 

The initial permanent human settlements have been traced back to around 14,000 BC.  Agricultural cultivation started between 6,000 and 8,000 BC and led to the first centralized, urban spaces (both Morris 1994, 3).  The development of villages then cities, meshed with the rise of agrarian societies, together initiated the use of more building materials for the permanent dwellings and the need for irrigation projects to water the crops.  The construction of canals and dikes followed, and became the first large-scale earth-moving activities (Hooke 2000, 843).  In roughly the same time period the wheel was invented, which “facilitated transport of geologic materials, both ore and stone, as well as other trade goods.  Because loads in carts cannot be moved efficiently over rough terrain, roads were invented to make maximal use of the increased hauling capacity provided by the wheel (Hooke 2000, 843). 

Copper mining and then bronze smelting, combining copper with tin, initiated new mining techniques.  It was not until the Iron Age, 2,500 years ago, that iron became cheaper and thus available to a larger population.  This initiated a positive feedback loop where, as one activity required the other, iron plough blades as well as iron hand tools allowed agriculture, mining, and stone masonry to advance upon the earth, creating the need for more iron ore to be mined, and so on.  The more iron cast, a greater manipulation of the natural landscape was made possible (Hooke 2000; 2002).  With more processes, more materials, more efficient technologies, and most importantly, a growing global population, anthropogeomorphology has continued unabated, growing exponentially with the passing years (Haff 2003).

The primary cause of global-scale erosion became anthropogenic “sometime during the latter part of the first millennium A. D.” Human-caused erosion is not just a symptom of industrial society—it predates that by a millennium (Wilkinson 2005, 161).  Through an examination of “prehistoric denudation rates imposed on land surfaces solely by natural processes,” Bruce Wilkinson determined that:
  
“Mean denudation over the past half-billion years of Earth history has lowered continental surfaces by a few tens of meters per million years.  In comparison, construction and agricultural activities currently result in the transport of enough sediment and rock to lower all ice-free continental surfaces by a few hundred meters per million years.  Humans are now an order of magnitude more important at moving sediment than the sum of all other natural processes operating on the surface of the planet” (Wilkinson 2005, 161).

More important than the erosion alone, this erosion associated with agriculture and construction  “exceed soil formation by an order of magnitude” (Wilkinson 2005, 161).  Not only do human actions account for the majority of erosionary activities, it also greatly outpaces soil formation.  To determine these rates Wilkinson set a baseline through estimating the “uplift and erosion [of sedimentary rock which] results in a progressive decrease in epoch-long interval rock volume with increasing age.”  He goes on, stating that “data on surviving amounts of sedimentary rock therefore allow for estimation of epoch-long rates of sediment accumulation, which in turn relate to rates of physical and chemical denudation over Earth’s subaerially exposed surface for at least the past half-billion years” (Wilkinson 2005, 161).  As the base level of all human actions, the amount of earth-change construction and agriculture accomplish in creating sustenance and shelter are so grand they are difficult to conceive of.  We as humans both individual and as a species impact the Earth enormously:  “soil and rock movement currently amounts to ~21t per person per year (6 from construction, 15 related to farming)” (Hooke 2000).  Also, over-irrigation, which leads to soil salination, and fertilization of cropland are both instances of chemical weathering (Brown 1970, 79).  Even if the erosion is balanced across continents, the overdeveloped north accounts for much more than the global south.  Wood and other construction products are made elsewhere, and agricultural commodities and products travel to global markets.  The links are complicated and only the earth-change is universal. 

Construction sites cause significant erosion—in Japan alone urban land use development accounted for 1.3 x 10 (to the 9th) cubic meters a year in 1970 (Kadomura 1980, 138).  The need for construction materials from offsite and out of the area, of a sort that modern modes of transportation make possible, is also impacting geomorphic processes greatly:  “Demand in the UK [for aggregates for concrete] has gone from 20 million tones per annum in 1900, to 50 m tones in 1948, to 276 m tones in 1973.  It is an increase per capita from 0.6 tones per year to 5 tones per year” (Goudie 2000, 269). 

At the rate it is occurring today, “the amount of [eroded] material would fill the Grand Canyon of Arizona in ~50 years,” again a scale much larger than that of the landscape, which is the largest the human eye can take in.  This matters geomorphologically because “over the interval of anthropogenic erosion, delivery of sediment to rivers quickly exceeds rates of transport that are possible in fluvial systems that have more or less attained geomorphic equilibrium over a significantly longer prehistory with an appreciably lower sediment flux” (Wilkinson 2005, 163-164).  What humans do at every level is to disrupt geomorphic equilibrium; this is anthropogeomorphology’s end-result. 

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While much of this research is solidly academic, the statistical information about society's use of geologic materials such as the aggregates for concrete, is fairly stunning when considered as an agent in erosion and general geomorphic change.  With every new building and road, let alone skyscraper or elevated freeway, a bit more of the earth's surface changes location, never to return to its point of origin.  Seeing the city as the current end point of the flows of ores and aggregates, even down to the computer I am typing on and that, ostensibly, this blog will be read on, changes how one views the landscape.  The asphalt paving on the roads again becomes dead dinosaurs, the brick facade of a row home no longer solely reddish rectangles stacked two stories high. 

Works Cited

Brown, E. H. (1970). "Man shapes the Earth." The Geographical Journal 136(1): 74-85.
      
Goudie, A. (2000). anthropogeomorphology. Dictionary of physical geography, 3rd ed. D. S. G. T. Andrew Goudie. Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishing.
   
Goudie, A. (2000). The human impact on the natural environment.  5th ed. Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press.
   
Haff, P. K. (2000). "Prediction and the anthropic landscape." Eos Trans. AGU, 81 (48) Fall Meet. Suppl., Abstract xxxxx-xx.
   
Haff, P. K. (2003). "Modeling and predicting human impact on landscape." GSA 2003 Seattle Annual Meeting, abstracts.
      
Hooke, R. L. (2000). "On the history of humans as geomorphic agents." Geology 28(9): 843-846.
   
Hooke, R. L. (2002). Humans are geomorphic agents. Geological Society of America 2002 Denver Annual Meeting, Denver, CO.
   
Kadomura, H. (1980). "Erosion by human actvities in Japan." GeoJournal 4(2): 133-144.
   
Morris, A. E. J. (1994). A history of urban form:  Before the industrial revolutions, third edition. New York, Longman Scientific & Technical/ John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
      
Wilkinson, B. (2005). "Humans as geologic agents:  A deep-time perspective." Geology 33(3): 161-164.
  

mixed digital and physical infrastructures

27th St at South St., PHL.  AT&T fiber optic cables, USPS mailbox, a fire hydrant.  Across the street is a fortress-style AT&T building. 

Digital communications moving through AT&T's fiber optic cables that emerge from beneath the street at this point, physical communication in the form of mail can be deposited in the mailbox directly adjacent, and if there is a fire, the hydrant accesses Philadelphia's water supply as well.  This is a pretty useful example of the mixing of physical and digital elements in the urban landscape, in this case on the sidewalk in center city Philadelphia.

wires, towers, trash, and snow

There are plenty of infrastructural networks visible in this scene, and little aesthetic consideration for any of the systems. Cellular phone tower, electrical power lines, a dumpster, a motel, and plenty of asphalt for driving on. Shelbyville, Kentucky.

power lines, Tilden Park

Berkeley Hills.

corridors

Water, freeway, electrical power, probably a cellular phone tower or two as well.  The Schuylkill River from the South Street Bridge, Philadelphia.

outside looking in

The Quonix data center at 24th and Locust St. in Philadelphia. 

inclusion/exclusion in the city

 
From the chapter "Neobourgeois Space": 

What novelists like Perec, Beauvoir, and Rochefort -- no less than the Situationists performing their urban experiments in Paris during the same years, or Henri Lefebvre progressively recoding his initial concept of "everyday life" into a range of spatial and urban categories -- realized, was the emergence of a new image of society as a city -- and thus the beginning of a whole new thematics of inside and outside, of inclusion in, and exclusion from, a positively valued modernity.  Cities possess a center and banlieues, and citizens, those on the interior, deciding who among the insiders should be expelled, and whether or not to open their doors to those on the outside. -- Kristin Ross, from Fast Cars, Clean Bodies p. 149 - 150

What interests me about Ross's point, in the context of mobile connectivity and infrastructure, is how this inclusion/exclusion is reinforced through access to communication technologies.  The ease of wayfinding through a mapping app on a smart phone is only useful if you can access the phone and afford the data plan.  Is access to a smart phone a new inclusion into "positively valued modernity"?  And how is this access opened to outsiders?  The urban spaces have not changed much due to mobile connectivity, but the utility they spaces hold changes through on-the-go access to the Internet, for instance, through a smart phone.  Perhaps mobile and urban technologies can become more open and inclusive -- here is an example of public usb drives installed in New York City -- but, most likely, inclusion in urban society will necessitate leaving the phone in the pocket, inhabiting the physical city and not the cyber-city, and spending more time on the streets, on foot.

the invisible city

One Wilshire in downtown Los Angeles, a prominent colocation point on the west coast/eastern shore of the Pacific Ocean for global telecommunication providers. photo by Xeni Jardin, via flickr source

Kazys Varnelis's work, especially The Infrastructural City:  Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, is extremely useful for conceptualizing the space of telecommunications.  In looking over his essay on One Wilshire in The Infrastructural City again, I found this quote:

If the [Disney] Concert Hall represents late capitalism's obsession with the visual, One Wilshire represents the rise of invisible networks and unmappable forces in our lives.  The invisible city that grows from telecommunications is, by and large, a privatized infrastructure, its possession by private forces making it impossible to map.  Although the postmodern hyper-space of the Bonaventure [Hotel] is unmappable by the body, a legible floor plan can still be found.  No such plan exists for networked capital.  Diagrams of the Internet and of fiber optic lines are hard to find: the data is proprietary, a matter too important for corporations to allow free access.  Moreover, the complexity emerging along with the massive proliferation of connections increasingly makes it hard for even corporations owning the networks to understand their dimensions.  A floor plan of One Wilshire tells you little about what happens there.  Even for the corporate hive mind, the map is exceeded by a hypercomplex reality.  The space of global technological flows does not desire to become visual or apparent:  perhaps only some spray-paint [on asphalt] or a flag in the ground marks the presence of fiber below, and sometimes even that is elusive.  (pages 128-129)

Increasingly, conceptualizing the spaces of this invisible city require searching through pages upon pages of planning documents unearthed on the websites of municipalities to infer where a fiber-optic cable is run underground and which global corporation is putting it there.  This research is done more through identifying the spaces where conditions come together than by identifying the direct points or locations of the telecom infrastructures.

Telecommunication networking equipment inside One Wilshire. photo by Xeni Jardin, via flickr source 

live, global locations of cableships

The locations of the world's submarine fiber optic repair ships, 25 October 2010.  Source

The global flows of digital information require submarine fiber optic linkages between continents.  Since these cables are laid atop or just below the surface of the ocean floor, they are susceptible to being damaged by a number of sources, but primarily by fishing vessels dragging a net or anchor.  Consequently, a fleet of cable repair ships sit ready in most major ports worldwide to mend a break.  The 'x' is a sitting ship, and the triangles indicate moving ones.  One could deduce most important cable routes as well as the places with regular problems by the clustering of 'x's and triangles.  The English Channel, the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Oman, the Gulf of Aden, and the East China Sea.  If a cable becomes damaged in a location without a cableship nearby, as happened to east Africa's Seacom cable in late July, the ICT linkages could be down for a while.  Looking at this map, it seems that if a cable goes out in much of the Southern Hemisphere, unless a redundant link is in place, the affected regions could be without telecommunication linkages for a length of time, until a cableship is able to motor south to fix the outage.

submarine fiber optic cables attacked by sharks

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In the 1980s AT&T was prototyping submarine telecom cable by laying they between the Canary Islands, where the cables were attacked by crocodile sharks

Buried in the final section of a Rand Corporation study into the feasibility of a new platform for deep-sea submarines, is a chapter about the history of submarine cable infrastructure.  In an otherwise dry paragraph about the dangers from dragged anchors and the like that submarine cables face on the ocean floor, was this sentence:

"Between 1985 and 1987, AT&T found that its first deep-sea submarine fiber optic cable (laid between the Canary Islands, Grand Canaria and Tenerife) suffered periodic outages because of frequent attacks of the Pseudocarcharias kamoharai, or crocodile shark, on the cables."

The crocodile shark.  Source

A footnote goes on to explain that "The electric fields of which, it was thought, duplicated that of the shark’s prey under attack."*

I find this fascinating, and slightly amusing, that the globally networked fiber-optic communication system could be damaged enough to cut out by a shark attacking the cable.  Information and communication technologies exist as physical abstractions, of data flows between New York and London's financial centers that dictate the rise or fall of the day's stock trades, and out of nowhere the infrastructure could fail because of a hungry and/or angry shark, at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

*source: Martin, Rick, “Life History and Behavior of Lamnoid Sharks,” from ReefQuest Expeditions, 2001.