Abstract

Although the Anthropocene is regarded by many scholars across the sciences and humanities as an invitation to reflect on the politics of atmospheric suspension, its validating procedure in the hand of geoscientists is characterized by an emphasis on solid surfaces. Soon after Crutzen’s coinage of the term, to highlight humanity’s influence on the planet, geoscientists embarked on a quest to locate the start of this new era in stratigraphy. According to leading members of the Anthropocene Working Group, only signals that are already buried in stratigraphic sequences, clearly identifiable across the globe, are candidates to securely tell us when the Anthropocene started, a process described often as extremely conservative. Accordingly, signals need to become fossils before geoscientists are able to take action, for example, by officially introducing the term in geological charts. I argue that this petrified understanding of time corresponds to what could be described, paraphrasing Bergson, as a fossilized view of becoming, where time is seen as a punctuated accumulation of solid surfaces and the past remains accessible only to a selective group of experts. I conclude by suggesting that this punctuated and retrospective view of change, has resulted from a tendency to divorce earth and sky. Challenging this tendency requires, I propose, opening earth history to the more-than-solid flows of atmospheric suspension.