The Fossils Being Formed Today Will Show how Humankind Dirsupted Life on Earth - Prof Mark Williams

This year sees the 300th anniversary of the birth in Edinburgh of the man considered to be the father of modern geology, James Hutton. Just 14 years before the founding of our society, Hutton visited a location Sicker Point on the Bericure coast and found the evidence to support his theory that the Earth was vastly older than the then popular theory of about 6,000 years. He and his two companions basically looked and even said they looked into for the first time the vast abbyss of time. This evening we'll be turning our attention in the opposite direction towards the far future. Leads you to think what might some being of some sort in the future tens or even hundreds of millions of years. Hence, learn about humankind as they probe at some curious little layer of sediment, perhaps a few centimeters thick, and find whatever they might find. It's only a week or so before Burns night, so maybe I can just about get away with um taking a liberty with a couple of lines of his taken wildly out of context and paraphrase slightly. Oh, what some power the gifty gear us to see yourselves as others may see us. This evening the gifty will begin to us by our speaker, Professor Mark Williams. Mark is professor of paleobiology and earth sciences at the University of Leicester. He's something of a polymath whose interests have crossed over into architecture, business, and other fields. and he has had a particular interest in developing the theory that we have entered a new geological epoch, the anthroposine. He also explores how humans might avoid causing a mass extinction of life. Tonight's talk is entitled, "The fossils being formed today will show how humankind disrupted life on Earth." Over to you please Mark. >> Firstly, thank you very much to Campbell for that wonderful introduction and also thank you so much for the invitation to come and speak to the society. I'm really honored to be here and also really humbled to see how many have have come to listen to me talk tonight. Um so thank you very much. Um I'm going to talk about future fossils um or the fossils that we will leave behind and the way in which they will give a real signature to any geologists long into the future of what we've done to the earth system around us. And particularly I'm going to focus on life on Earth. Um just for fun um I Googled I did a Google AI search yesterday future fossils. What would humans leave behind? And Google AI told me that actually there would be a very limited signature of biological fossils. Maybe a few bones of domesticated animals, maybe a little bit of a pollen signal from uh agriculture, um maybe from the the vast number of species we've transllocated around the planet. Um I mean to show you that Google AI is wrong and that in fact we have left an absolutely profound signal. One of the things that Google AI will tell you is that we've left a really good signal of technosils. Now, I agree with that. We most definitely have. And by technopossils, I mean things like tin cans, plastic bottles, concrete, all the kind of flatsom and jetsum that you might expect humans to leave behind. We've left definitely left a signal of that too. Um I'm not going to talk about that so much this evening because I don't have time in a single talk. Um, and in any case, I want to show you that the biological fossils that we will leave behind will really show a profound and unique signature of the way in which we have affected all of life on this planet. And I use my chicken bones as an illustration of this. They're going to feature several times um as we go through this talk. We really have left a massive signature of change on this planet. um just about to coordinate a Royal Society volume on the biosphere in the anthroposine and it's going to be published next week. Um and as part of that we try to put together in a single figure all of the changes that you and I and everyone else has made to this planet. And it's actually really difficult to go anywhere on the planet now and not find some kind of signature of humanity and indeed as a result of that some kind of fossil signature of humanity as well. um which I'm going to demonstrate to you this evening. Now, what we tend to think of generally as fossils are those things that we might go and search for at the weekend. And for me, as a child, I would be out with my hammer and chisel and the local rocks where I grew up because I grew up on the Carboniferous um looking for fossils. Um because you have wonderful fossils in the Glasgow neighborhood. I was wondering if Neil Clark would be in the audience this evening because I saw him on the BBC website I think on the 27th of December talking about um this sh this shark fossil. Um now that's what we typically think of I think as fossils. Um it's fossils of course which give us the main insights we have into how life has evolved on our planet over hundreds of millions of years and indeed billions of years. Um in my career I've been lucky enough to look at some amazing fossils. I've had access to this deposit in China um called the Chang Jang biota in Junan Province and the Chang Jang biota is really unique because it preserves all of the soft anatomy of the fossils. Um you can see the fossils there on the right hand side and that's how we reconstruct them. Now of course it's this fossil record of those things that have gone extinct. 99.9% of things that ever lived have gone extinct. It's this fossil record that tells us how the biosphere has evolved over huge amounts of time. It shows us both negative and positive changes to the biosphere on planet Earth. And the negative ones are the things I think we can all immediately relate to. Um perhaps the most famous geological boundary anywhere is that of the asteroid strike of 66 million years ago in the Gulf of Mexico that defined the Cretaceous Paleogene boundary and was definitely a negative impact on the biosphere. It caused very very significant biodiversity loss. Something of the order of 75% of all of the species on planet Earth went extinct at this point in time. What I think is less well known about the paleontological record is it also reveals to us incredible events of innovation which have led to greater biomass, greater amounts of life on planet earth and greater biodiversity. One of the really good examples of that is the evolution of flowering plants in the Cretaceous around about 160 million years ago. It's an event of singular importance as I'll show you a little bit later because flowering plants have been instrumental in making the biosphere a much better place. So we have both these negative events and we have these positive events clearly revealed in the fossil record of planet earth. The question is what are you and I going to be? Are we going to be negative disruptors of the biosphere? a bit like the asteroid strike 66 million years ago or are we going to be positive disruptors of the biosphere like the evolution of flowering plants down in the Cretaceous? It is a question now of singular importance to us because in this epoch of geological time that many of us are now trying to work to become a component of the geological time scale, humans have become de facto the most important geological agents at the surface of our planet. And so we'd argue that we'd left the holosene epoch of geological time and that we've actually entered this new epoch called the anthroposine which is dominated by humanity and it would seem that we are predominantly negative disruptors of the biosphere at present. Um I think that's really well encapsulated in this quote from a research paper that I'm going to come back to a little bit later in this talk. Um, and I also found this image of the boy with the Goliath grouper, um, taken on Key West, I think sometime in the early 1960s, as a real metaphor for the way in which we now dominate the world around us. You can see the quote there. Um, industrialized societies like our own use something like 50 times that of place-based societies. And by place-based societies, I mean those societies which are intimately interrelated with their environment. indigenous um cultures for example it is that massive rate of consumption which is degrading the earth system and which is producing the anthroposine in the geological record. Now those patterns of consumption are really nicely encapsulated in these graphs made by a chap called Will Stefen who was a professor at the Australian National University and Will was part of the group the anthroposine working group that I'm also part of. He's now sadly passed away. Um, but this is really brilliant work that they did about two decades ago to try to quantify the degree of change. Um, Will did many different graphs. I've just put a few of them up here, but of course there's one that everybody always focuses in on. Um, it's always the spread of burger restaurants on planet Earth. You can see though since the middle part of the 20th century, there has been a massive increase in the way that humanity consumes. Um, there are indeed 39,000 McDonald's restaurants on planet Earth, 19,000 Burger Kings, and 32,000 KFC's. And that growth really is since the middle of the 20th century. Um, it's a real good example, I think, of the way in which we consume with impunity. I just want to give you a few figures to give you a kind of definition of how we feel the anthroposine should be conceived. We are the major movers of Earth at the surface of our planet. You can see the figures there. 150 cubic kilometers of sediment every year. An order of magnitude more than all of the world's rivers. We use a vast amount of water around about 4,000 cubic kilometers of water every year. I can't visualize that. I don't know what that looks like, but I do know it would be the equivalent of humanity draining one of the giant East African lakes every two years. And I just want to bring it a bit closer to home to you. It's the equivalent of draining Loch Ness every 6 hours. That's what humanity does in terms of its consumption on planet Earth. I don't think I even need to mention the atmosphere to you. I'm sure you all know that we're having a fundamental change on changing that component of the earth system. Most of what I'm going to focus on in this talk is about the biosphere, but I wanted also to give you a sense of what's happening to all of the different components of the Earth's system as well. Changes to the biosphere are really, really fundamental and they have left already a very, very distinctive fossil signal on our planet. All of these different components, changes to the atmosphere, to water, to the earth, and to life, they've all left a signal in the geological record long, long into the future. Of course, plastics as technop fossils are going to be one of those big signatures millions and millions of years long into the future. When we were trying to define the boundary of the anthroposine, we decided that the middle of the 20th century was the inflection point when humans started to really consume at an incredibly rapid rate and we needed a geological marker, something that we could find everywhere across the planet to indicate the same age time. That's what we do as geologists when we're defining geological boundaries. And we found that the radiogenic fallout from atomic bomb tests in the 1950s gave us that signal. Indeed, anywhere you look on planet Earth, in the rivers and lakes around me and Leicster, I've got PhD students researching these, we find that signature in the Antarctic ice, wherever you want to go on the planet and almost certainly in the sediments of the Clyde, it's everywhere you look. It's a really good marker from a geological perspective, but of course, from a philosophical perspective, it doesn't really reflect very well on us as a species. You can kind of quantify those changes. Um this is a graph produced by my colleague Colin Waters on the anthroposine working group and it's just showing you that mid 20th century inflection of things like radiogenic fallout from those Abomb tests. The cumulative production of concrete um the massive production of plastics and the global black carbon. The black carbon comes from combustive processes, industrial processes. It's also left a signal wherever you go. It's been falling out of the atmosphere. If you go down into sediment successions and lakes and things, you'll find that signature there. All of these as key indicators of this anthroposine epoch of geological time. Now, that was just to give you a kind of preamble entry to the anthroposine. What I'm going to focus on for the rest of the talk is very much what we've done as a species that will leave behind a biological signal in the fossil record of huge change. I'm going to ask three questions. The first is how have humans actually changed the biosphere. The second one is I want to show you how that's been recorded in the stratal record, the the rock record of our planet. And the third one is I want to ask you the question, what kinds of disruption to the biosphere are we causing? Will we be negative? Will we be positive? And how might that appear to a future geologist? How have humans changed the biosphere? I've tried to just neatly summarize it in this figure here. I'll go into a bit more detail as we go through the the talk, but the cow is representing concentration way in which we've stored mass in the things that we like to eat. The Pacific rat is showing you how we've transllocated lots of species around the planet, tens of thousands of them. um that oil palm plantation plantation in Calimantan in Indonesia is talking about the way that we've reconfigured ecosystems globally on this planet. And on the right bottom bottom side, I'm showing you the way that we appropriate a massive amount of energy from the biosphere. We're really greedy as a species in terms of the amount of energy we suck out of all life on this planet. And I'll try to quantify some of these for you as we we go through this talk. This is a figure I put together recently just to try to show these patterns in a graphical form. Perhaps the one I think that is the most worrying here is that living planet index. If you look at the one on the left hand side, the living planet index is based on about 35,000 monitored populations of 5 a half thousand vertebrate species on this planet over the past 50 years. And over the past 50 years, it's shown a 73% reduction, which really terrifies me. Um, then we can look at all of the other different kind of parameters here. The number of species transllocations currently running at around 300 a year. These are the species we take out of their native range. Um, wild terrestrial mammal biomass versus domestic mammal biomass. We and the animals we eat are 98% of it and everything else is 2%. um molllesk extinction now running at we think about 13% of molllesks lepidoptran abundance I've used as a proxy for insects so there's those are butterflies and you can see also mammal extinctions there the key thing for me as a paleontologist is pretty much all of these apart from the lepidoprine diminishing uh patterns there have left a geological signal and I'm going to demonstrate that fossil signal to you as we go through this talk a fossil signal which I think will be permanent um over thousands and millions of years into the future. Now this again is a complicated figure so I apologize for this but I want to put it in um just to show you how you compare with all of the big events in deep time. So on the bottom of the scale there we have a scale which is showing positive change that's towards the right and towards the left is negative change and I must give due deference to the posttock who's working with me on this Tom Wong hearing because he's been brilliant in quantifying all of this different data. So you've got negative change to the left positive change to the right. Um you can see kind of neutral through the middle and above that in the area that's kind of highlighted pink and also below it those are past negative disruptions to the biosphere, lots of them quantified over different geological time periods. The numbers you can see to the right are numbers in millions of years. And at the bottom also you can see the Cretaceous Paleogene boundary. That's when that big asteroid hit our planet um 66 million years ago. And then in the middle what we've tried to do is quantify the degree of biodiversity loss and the rate of loss and also the rate of biomass loss. What we see when we compare it with deep time is that you and I are now the second fastest changer of the biosphere in Earth history certainly through the past 539 million years. Um, I want to come back to this a little bit later. Um, because there there's also the chance that we can move towards being much more positive disruptors if we play our cards right. Um, but we are now the second fastest disruptor in a negative sense to the biosphere in Earth history. 1 million species at risk of extinction. Do we even know? Because we haven't even quantified the number of species there are on planet Earth, but it's obviously a sign significant amount. If you Google extinct animals, what you get are the things that you um would expect. The dodo, of course, that went extinct in a few decades um of Maitius after humans arrived. Um beautiful animals like the Caribbean monk seal, not seen since 1952. The Yangy dolphin, not seen since 2007. It's part of a much bigger extinction. Those are the big things that appear when you Google them. But if you dig a bit deeper, you'll see that this is really now quite a major extinction event. Um Rob Cowi at the University of Hawaii is one of the leading people in trying to quantify the impacts on mollisks on planet Earth. Um on a why they've had real problems with their indigenous mollisk populations. Most of them have been extrapated or or have gone extinct. And you can see what Rob and his team have done here. They're now suggesting that over the past 500 years, something of the order of 260,000 species of mollisks may have gone extinct. That's much much higher than the red list would tell us. And we can show that. We can actually demonstrate this change in the fossil record. I'll show you some of this a little bit later. So, we're now in a very, very significant extinction event. I also alluded to the living planet index and the diminishing of populations of species on planet Earth. Now, we're not yet in a mass extinction, as in we haven't lost 70% of biodiversity, or we think we haven't so far. But the but because we're losing so much populations of all of these different species, we're pushing up the extinction debt. The extinction debt means we're actually getting closer and closer to a mass extinction, which we've tried to illustrate in this figure. So, not in a mass extinction event yet, but very, very close to it if we could carry on with the same trajectory. Now, extinction is a big part of what we've done as a species, and it has a demonstrable fossil record. Um, but actually, we've done much more, much bigger disruptors than just extinction. Um, for example, we've concentrated mass and the things we like eating. Um, I alluded to this in that summary figure. I'm now going to go into this in a bit more detail and show you what we've done. So, this is a nice plot from a paper by two panological colleagues in North America. Very good piece of work. Um, just showing you the rise in consumption of things like pigs and sheep um, and cattle. Um, and you can see also on this figure that there's something of an inflection in the middle part of the 20th century. again speaking to this idea of an anthroposine. So we've obviously extended our populations of farm animals very very considerably. I want to break this down to one individual species just to give you a sense of just how colossal the human impact is. So on planet Earth at present there are 26.56 billion chickens. That's at present every day of the week. They are 70% of the mass of all birds on this planet. So one species is 70% of the mass of all birds locked into this single species. We profoundly changed these organisms for our benefit. The Chicken of Tomorrow breeding program in the United States in the 1950s set a course to increase the mass of chickens. We've increased their individual mass four-fold um in the space of about seven decades. Um their growth rates are incredibly accelerated. So they go from egg to being called in between six and 8 weeks. Um so if you buy one of these chickens that's not a freerange chicken, it's been alive for about 6 weeks. Um and the other thing is they've been engineered in such a way that they really can't live beyond 6 to 8 weeks because their bones are so weak. Their necks snap after that. So, it's not not a good livelihood for a bird whose ancestors lived for about 8 to 14 years in the jungles of Southeast Asia. We eat 70 billion of them each year. There are more than 32,000 KFCs on planet Earth in more than 150 countries and proudly boasting on their website over $ 34 billion of sales so far. the link is clear between the way that we consume um and the way that we're affecting life around us. So that's concentration. But what about transllocation? So this is the way in which we've taken species and either directly or indirectly moved them around the planet. And pretty much everything you can think of humans have had a hand in moving around the planet. So, um, invertebrates, things like mollisks and arthropods. Um, plants, things like Himalayan balsam up there on the left. Um, frogs, snails. Um, snails have been wonderful in in the damage that they've done as they've been transllocated across the planet. We've done this many thousands of times. Think about it. Things like the transllocation of maze after the Columbian exchange. It's now become the the one of the three most important commodity crops on planet earth and it's left a fossil signal of that Columbombian exchange. So if you go to African lakes, lakes in East Africa, you can find a pollen signal of maze from the early part of the 18th century indicating this kind of colombian exchange event. It's an accelerating process. um a whole set of nice graphs from the uh uh from the biologist Hannah Sebans at the Senkenberg in Frankfurt also showing you the number of species that have been transllocated across the planet. And if you think about it, it's inevitable because this is our international transport networks of shipping. Um this is a a grab a snapshot of this in time. You can watch this in real time. watch all the transponders from the shipping moving around the planet almost mimicking the kind of great surface ocean currents of planet earth. Of course, much of this trade has developed from the middle of the 20th century. Certainly, things like the panacific trade has really accelerated since the middle of the 20th century. It's this means of redistributing species around the planet. And that redistribution ignores um long founded biogeographical provinces. So I think we've all learned about Alfred Russell Wallace and the Wallace line in Southeast Asia. It's actually very complicated when you come to look at all the different biogeographical boundaries in Southeast Asia. But golden apple snails don't care. Golden apple snails were introduced into East Asia in about 1979 1980. They have now flooded their way through Southeast Asia. They particularly like human modified ecologies, patty fields for example. and they couldn't care less about Alfred Wallace, Alfred Russell Wallace's line. They just bound straight across it. So those longheld biogeographical divisions that we've kind of grown up with are being broken down by this homogenization of the biosphere. And this is going to be really unique. Um I've picked on avocados because avocados in particular have been explosive in the way in which they've been traded around the world since the 1960s. But think about this. In the middle of the avocado is that big solid endocarp, the pip if you like, that goes into landfill. And they really do go into landfill. Um, and they're going to go into landfill in so many places around the world, so far beyond the native range of where avocados grow. And also, they're going to go into landfill with no representation of the actual plants that they came from. That's going to leave a very very strange signal for a future paleontologist to find. And avocados is just one component of this. All of these detached parts of organisms that can only happen if you've got a human in interceded. We also reconfigured the landscape. Um, I showed you those oil palm plantations in East East Asia in Calibantaman, but this is a really nice plot produced by Earl Ellis of the University of Maryland just showing you the way in which humans have now dominated the landscape. Um, so here in 1700 you can see used components, those kind of heavily human impacted parts of the biosphere are only a tiny percent. When you come forward three years, three years, 300 years, um you can see that 50% is used and 75% of the ice-free landscape is in some way impacted by humans. In fact, it's higher than this now. Um maybe up to 90% in some estimations. So again, a real real indication of human change. In fact, if I paraphrase Earl, he would say that the world is no longer dominated by natural ecosystems with humans disturbing them, but rather is dominated by human systems with more or less modified natural ecosystems embedded within them. That that's a profound statement because that now is saying that you and I are the dominant component of ecosystems on the planet with remnants of the of the pristine biosphere embedded within them. And as I've already said, we appropriate a huge amount of energy from the biosphere. We were already doing this in the 19th century, by some estimates, perhaps taking 10% of all of its production. And that's trickled really over the past century. So now we're far beyond what is actually sustainable from a human um multiecies kind of interaction. So I hope I've shown you that your and my impact on the biosphere is absolutely profound. Now, what I want to show you is how that might find its way into the fossil record or indeed how it has actually found its way into the fossil record. Hence my um back to my chicken bones again. I'm going to look at concentration first of all and then I'm going to look at transllocation with you. Um concentration as we've already talked about this is concentrating mass into those animals and those plants that we like to eat. And I particularly picked on chickens because I think it's emblematic of this change. So if you look at the way that humans have changed chickens over the past seven decades, the morphological differences are really quite profound. Um again, this is some work of a PhD student from a few years back, Caris Bennett. Um and you can see from the data here that chicken bones stay pretty much similar through most of history. Um and then when you get right up to the present in the past kind of 70 years or so, they suddenly become gigantic. Now, for me as a paleontologist, I would definitely see that in the fossil record. In fact, I'd probably say, "Oh, something's happened here. This is a new species. It would be a real marker, a time marker for me." And of course, millions of tons of chicken bones are going into landfill every single day of the week. So, therefore, there is almost certainly a really profound palentological signal of this. Sometimes the whole carcasses go into landfill. Um I think during the COVID pandemic this was happening. Chickens were getting um tipped in this manner. Um there's a really poignant story associated with this website if you want to go and follow up cuz a passer by driving here spotted two chickens still alive picked them up and rescued them which I thought was a lovely story in what is otherwise a fairly dreadful situation. Now, that I could interpret as a paleontologist. It would be a weird kind of concentrated deposit. But what on earth am I going to do with a whole deposit just of chicken drumsticks or chicken wings or the breastplate? Because that's exactly what we're going to find in landfill. We're going to find places where we've just got the drumsticks or the wings or maybe the other bits of the chicken. That's weird. I can't really think of a similar kind of fossil setting anywhere in the geological record. And of course, it can only happen with a human intercedent. So, our future geologists are going to look back and say, "What on earth were they doing with chickens?" A lot. And they will be captured. I absolutely countered what AI says in terms of there'll be no biological signal of this. There are millions of tons of chicken bones going into landfill every day and there are thousands, tens of thousands of landfill sites across planet Earth. They will definitely leave a distinctive fossil signal long into the future. Back to that paper by Plotnik and Koi where they plotted up um the changes in cattle and pigs and things going into the 20th century. And now a focus on the state of Michigan just to see what the fossil signature of all this change might be in that one state. Um what you're seeing here are landfill sites. Those are the ones in circles and the crosses are cemeteries, places where human remains are deposited. Um they've plotted of course the changing patterns of um these different animals in the state of Michigan rising very rapidly and they argue very coherently that this is also going to leave a profound signal of you and me long into the future both in landfills and also in cemeteries. So these kind of places which are now dotted across our landscape also are going to leave a fossil signature of you and me long long into the future. And that fossil signal is going to be really weird. It's again going to break down the kind of biogeographical patterns that we might be familiar with because the distribution of many of these farm animals reflects culture, the way in which we consume. So water buffaloos are going to be typical fossils of South Asia and Southeast Asia. Pigs are going to be particularly in East Asia, in Europe and in North America. Chickens and cattle will be everywhere in terms of their fossil signature. Not reflecting biogeography, paleo geography if you like, but reflecting the patterns of different groups of humans and how they consume and the different things they consume. again completely reconfiguring the fossil record long into the future. The second one I want to look at you with is is transllocation. So this is the movement of non-native species around the planet and the kind of fossil signature that leaves. And this is the one that I have the strongest interest in although I haven't worked on the hippopotamus and in Colombia. What on earth are they doing in Colombia? Yeah. Well, we know what they're doing there. I'm going to take you first of all to San Francisco Bay because I think it's one of the best places on the planet to show you how profound the changes are to ecologies and how that leaves a distinctive fossil record wherever you look. So, we're going to go into San Francisco Bay. It's a place where there are lots of non-native species. Um, that's not surprising if you think about the fact that it's sitting on the west coast of North America and it's really embedded into this panacific trade. and we're going to be able to demonstrate how that panacific trade has altered the ecology of San Francisco Bay. It's a classic piece of work by Andy Cohen and Jim Carlton about three decades ago actually tracked all of these non-native species coming into the bay over the past 150 years since the California gold rush when San Francisco really began in the 1850s. Um, there's something of an inflection on this graph, too. And for example, the Manila clam arrives in the middle of the 20th century. Again, what on earth is the Manila clam doing in San Francisco Bay? Because it's pretty obvious where it comes from. Um, it's been brought in by international shipping. Um, and the thing I think which is most striking here is they found that in some parts of the bay, pretty much all of the organisms and all of the biomass is nonnative. So, all of the native stuff expuned in many parts of the bay. I'm going to take you out into the bay and we're going to pick up some sediment core. We're going to go out on the United States Geological Surveys research vessel, the RV Snaply. We're going to be out there with a French film crew who were interested in kind of filming these changes and also with my good friend Mary man who's been one of the real leaders in trying to understand these paltological changes of the anthroposine. So here we're out into the bay and this might be a bit noisy but we thought the noise would be really good to to to listen to. So I'll try to speak above it. Um, but you're going to hear the sound of the drill rig. And if you look in the background, you'll see the Golden Gate Bridge, so you'll know exactly where you are. So, here we are. We're on the RV snally. We've put this shallow drawing piece of shallow drawing pit over the side. It's gone down into the bay. It's going to bring up about a 2 m sediment core for us. And that 2 m sediment core we can date by various means. We know it's going to cover about the last 100 years or so. It's going to give us a good signal of everything that's been happening in the bay over that period. You can just see the core coming up now. That's Dan in the in the fall in the in the background. And that's Mary, my colleague at the at the USGS in the in the foreground. Mary, just making sure that they don't snag the lines as the core comes up. Okay, the core's come up and it's now on the vessel. You can see the cing device and inside that is this 2meter grab of sediment from the seabed. It's a recording device because that 2 meters of sediment is going to give us the past 100 years of accumulation of sediments in the bay. We're going to take that core back to Mary's lab at Menllo Park in California and we're going to sample through it. We're going to pick out the microossils or the things we can find in the core. That's exactly what Mary's done here. And she's now got some of those fossils, very recent fossils, but still fossils under the microscope. And you can see them there in the background. And it is amazing when you see what's found its way into San Francisco Bay and where it's come from. So now if we magnify them, you can see where some of these things are actually arriving from. So A to C, they're ostrac. Ostricods are tiny by valve crustaceans. They look a bit like a lobster but inside a inside a tiny shell about a millimeter long. And you can see the A and B come from East Asia. One is from China and Japan and the other one is from Japan. C is also an ostricod and that comes from the east coast of North America. So it's also being moved from the east to the west coast. Um D that's a a group of organisms called for aminifra. They're single cellled organisms to make a shell. And there's about 40,000 species of them documented documented on planet earth. And that particular one comes from the seas around Japan. And then on the right you have a mollisk called Potamo Corbula Amurensis or more colloally known as the Aml River Clam. The Amal River lying on the boundary between Russia and China in the far east. So here you go straight away in the core. It's full of things that have originated in East Asia and have been transllocated across um the sea by international shipping mainly in the ballasted water of large shipping. That's how these things have got across. I just want to show you the impacts of one of these on the on the fauna in San Francisco Bay. So you can see here's the Am River clam. We know it arrives in 1986 because that's the observational record. Um, it rapidly became the most abundant mollisk in many places. And then within a couple of years, there were 2,000 individuals per square meter. And then within about 5 years, there were up to 20,000 individuals per square meter. So much so that these mollisks expuned space for all of the other life in the places they were colonizing in the bay. They had a really dramatic impact on in San Francisco Bay. They wiped it out basically in those places where they became dominant. Then we have this forinifra that arrived from Japan. Um and it's done the same. So the forominiferans in San Francisco Bay have been living there happily for thousands of years. They were dominated by that species Helidium excavatum. That's the indigenous species. And then Trokamina had arrived and you can see that within a few years um it too had become the dominant entity in the bay. Now as a geologist and a strategrapher what I tried to do is to look at the fossil record to use them as time markers. So we have evolution changing species as we go through time and we can use that to give us a relative indication of time. I could do that 100 million years ago or 500 million years ago, but nobody's tried to do that through the past 70 years. Um, well, Steven Hson, who is a PhD student that Mary and I supervised, he did exactly that. He took these cores in San Francisco Bay and he studied the incomings of all of these different non-native species and he was able to replicate the observed timing of when they arrived in the bay with the order of sequence that they arrived in the cause. We do that in deep time, but we don't typically do that in shallow time. So, forgive me because I'm a child of the 1960s, so I remember the Bay City Rollers really well. Um, around about the time the Bay City Rollers were the most popular pop band on planet Earth, those Ostricods arrived from Japan into San Francisco Bay, middle part of the 1970s. And then, because my formative years were in the 1980s, because that's when I was a teenager, and I like groups like Simple Minds, so I've used Simple Minds here. um in the 1980s that for aminifra and the mollisks arrived and the order of arrival in the core replicates the observed time that they came in. So here you have a incredibly detailed record of fossil changes in a sediment core which are signaling these wider changes to the biosphere. I can take you anywhere in the planet and demonstrate this to you. I'm going to take you to just a couple more places. Um, one is 4,000 kilometers away across the Pacific into the Hawaiian Islands in one of the most remote places really on planet Earth from a geographical biogeographical perspective. But you can see the number of non-native species there in Hawaii. And here in Hawaii, which is the place where Rob Cowi works, the chappie looks at mollisks. You can see the fossil record of these incoming non-native species again and you can see their impacts on the indigenous snails. So here in the middle figure, you've got a record of the snails that have been found in this sinkhole on the right. So we take a sediment core and you analyze the different layers. And you can see that at the bottom of the core, you've got lots of molllesks, lots of snails that were indigenous to this island, Kawaii. And then at the top, all the indigenous snails have gone to be replaced by giant African snails that were introduced in the middle part of the 20th century. I don't know why really. And then the cannibal snail was introduced to try to control the giant African snails. Didn't have a good effect on the indigenous snails. Um, it's left a distinctive signal of extinction followed by non-native species, which again is a pattern that we're starting to see emerging around the planet. Last place I want to take you to is to my home county of Leicster, where I work, just to show you that these patterns really are emerging everywhere. Um, well, we have these animals in our water systems and they're most definitely not native. The river saw cuts right through the center of Leicester. Um, for a long time this was a pretty dire place to go, but more recently the city's really tried to work on making this a conservation area and it's actually had a very good impact. And now you can see in fact that industry, light industry is actually cheap by jowl with nature which is really good. But there's a big problem here because the systems in the river saw are being invaded. Um we have clams from East Asia which tend to out compete the native clams and along the river banks in all of the repairarian habitats we have himalayan balsam um which most definitely isn't native. Um and it's a beautiful plant. You might have seen it as you've been walking around in your neighborhoods, too. Looks like an orchid, smells beautiful in summer, and it attracts lots of insect life. It's got some positive benefits. The problem is it grows so prolifically that it expunes everything else from the habitat around it. And it's prolific. Again, picture from Amy Risdale, one of my PhD students, working on this, actually calculating the way that Himalayan Bolsman's spread through this island um over the past 100 years or so. And you can see that in the past 50 years or so, it's really been prolific. Um it's definitely in your neighborhoods too, as I'll show you in a moment. Um so, we went to the river c river saw and we caugh it. We brought up sediment cores. We dated those sediment cores by various different methods and then we looked to see if we could find a pollen signature of of Himalayan balsam um in those cores and that's exactly what we see. So that's the pollen of Himalayan balsam there on the left against the flower on the right. Um and when you go to the sediment core, if you pick through it very carefully in the way that Amy has done, you go through a whole series of layers, you can see the core um depth on the left hand side there going down about a meter and you can see the dating that that we've used. So we've captured about 200 years here. Um if you're very careful like Amy, you go through the core, you sample it for the pollen, and you tot up the abundances of the pollen. There are lots of plants there that would be very familiar to you like salix which is willow which you'd expect to find growing next to a river. But then hopefully you can see the big purple spike at the top of that. That big purple spike starts to come in in the 1960s and then it really begins when you get into 1980s. That's Himalayan balsam. That is the fossil signature of a non-native plant in our landscape leaving a very distinctive signal. We've got it not just in this core but in other cores. And that means that I can basically as a paleontologist correlate from San Francisco to Hawaii to Leicester to see exactly the same patterns emerging everywhere on the planet. This massive pattern of change. This was just a summary figure really to show you all of the different kind of species that are moving about the planet very very rapidly and can be used to make this kind of strategraphy of change. What about recent change in Glasgow? Now, to my knowledge, nobody has gone out and caugh the River Clyde to look for these kind of signatures. If anybody's interested in doing it, we'd really be interested in in looking at that because I think, you know, in a in a city like this with its history of of connections around the world, you're going to have some really profound palentological signals. Um, I mean, well, Chinese mitten crabs arrived about a decade ago. They'll have left a fossil signature in their carropase, but they also borrow sediments like hell. So they'll have made a big big physical change that you'll be able to signature in your sediment succession. And in your river catchment, Himalayan balsam is growing everywhere. It too will almost certainly have left a pollen record in the sediments that will signify these huge changes to the biosphere on planet Earth. Again, if anyone's interested in doing this, we'd be really interested to look. The fossil record of all of this change is eye-catching. I think I hope I've demonstrated that to you. Now, I hope I've shown you that AI was completely wrong on this one, as it often is on lots of things, as we know. Um, the fossil record is eye-catching, but it isn't yet a mass extinction. It's not far off, but it's not quite a mass extinction. And so finally in the last bit of this talk, if you could bear with me just for another 10 minutes or so, I want to ask the question of what are we? Are we positive or negative disruptors of the biosphere? And I've used this planetary boundaries figure that some of you may know produced by the Stockholm Resilience Center. It looks at the nine planetary boundaries that we need to maintain in order for in order to have a habitable place on this planet. Um, and the depressing thing is that as this has developed over the past 20 years, the number of boundaries that have been perturbed by humans is going up and up and up. We've now perturbed seven of the nine boundaries. And the one that really frightens me the most, although they're all quite frightening, is the biosphere integrity one. You can see that's classified as genetic and functional. So the genetic is, if you like, the diversity, and the functional here is defined as the amount of energy we appropriate from the biosphere. It's causing a massive disruption. It seems to be rapidly evolving towards one of the big negative disruptions in deep time. Um, I already showed you this figure and sorry it's very horribly complicated. I know that. But all I really wanted to point out to you is by our calculations at the bottom there, we are now the second fastest disruptor in a negative sense of the biosphere on planet Earth. But could we do this? So what we've plotted here now on the top are the positive disruptions. Things like flowering plants and the way in which they increased biodiversity, the ways in which they increased the mass of life on our planet. Could we actually push the biosphere in that direction? This is a nice paper by Mike Benton. If you you know Mike Benton, he's a a paleontologist at Bristol University. And it's just summarizing all of the kind of positives if you like of the evolution of flowering plants, the way in which they were able to extend habitability across the planet to improve the efficiency of capturing energy from the sun and the wonderful symbiosis and mutualisms that they formed with so many different organisms on our planet, invertebrates and vertebrates. Really, we have a huge amount to learn from flowering plants in terms of our interaction with the biosphere. But, and I'm sure many of you know this, there are a multitude of examples of where humans have been wonderful at fostering biodiversity on our planet. I'm going to just use a few examples at the end of this this talk because I think it's really important that we focus on these because these are the positive disruptors, the things which emulate the kinds of patterns that we can see with flowering plants. In the western Australian desert, for example, where people have been living for thousands of years, they have learned to increase the heterogeneity in the landscape. And by increasing the heterogeneity, they have fostered biodiversity. They are super generalists in their landscape. When they are there, the landscape is much more biodiverse. And when they're not there, the landscape is much poor poorer. Unfortunately, government policies in the 1960s which were probably racist and colonial um deliberately moved people off the land and that resulted in a simplification of the ecology because the humans were the super generalists. They were the ones really trying to nurture the diversity in that landscape. Um, I showed you this paper right at the start when I gave you that quote about humans in industrial societies like ours consuming 50 times what indigenous communities do. Um, in that same paper is a wonderful image of the way in which humans used to be super generalists in those western Australian deserts. At the center of this incredible food web and diversity and then they got locked into the international system which is there depicted by the bag of flour and the tin of ham. And you can see how that impacted the biosphere. It simplified it. It degraded the diversity. There are lots of examples of this. Cork oak savanas in southern Europe and in North Africa. Again, managed landscapes that people are interacting with in which the diversity can be enhanced. Um but changing practices are having having a a major impact on these two because we often buy bottles of wine with screw tops and not corks and therefore things like that are impacting the livelihoods of people who work in these kinds of landscapes. and the indigenous fishes of the North Pacific who use a whole range of different methods to catch fish which are very spec specific to the kinds of fish they want don't damage the kinds of fish they don't want and they have a strong mutualistic relationship with the fish they have a vested interest in preserving those fish populations long into the future they are what sustained them um again I think this is a a wonderful paper oops that's appeared in the wrong place um but doesn't really matter and it's clipped the top of it. Um top left you would see indigenous approaches to fishing and top right you would see kind of industrial approaches to fishing. And I think the only one that I really need to emphasize here is the social ecological resilience at the bottom of there. The indigenous approach means that people can sustain their livelihoods and the biosphere around them over thousands of years. Whereas the industrialized approaches, our approaches don't. in Glasgow, you're doing this, too. Um, I was just looking the other day to see if I could find really nice examples of people trying to nurture their biosphere, and I found the hidden garden. Who's been to the hidden garden? It looks wonderful. I haven't got time to go there, but I I wish I could because I didn't just see a fantastic landscape where people were trying to enhance biodiversity, but was also getting people involved in understanding nature. So, I don't know whether some of you organized this in the room, but I thought that was lovely. That was a really good example of humans as mutualists with the with the biosphere. Okay, I've come to the end. Um, and I wanted to finish on a positive note because I think we can really still be positive disruptors of the Earth system. What fossil record will we leave for a future geologist to find? It's going to be one of globally distributed species, often demarcating novel or farmed ecologies. I've shown you that we'll find aquatic species mixed with terrestrial deposits that will definitely include bones of chickens in the landfill. That's going to be really curious from a propelontologist perspective. Selected parts of organisms, so bits of uh chicken drumsticks or avocado seeds that suddenly become global and occur far beyond the environmental range of the parent. extinction of local indigenous species. I've shown you that in Hawaii, closely associated with the arrival of non-native species and probably often associated with technoposils with things like plastics and tin cans, etc. That's where we are now. And a future geologist just above those levels may find a mass extinction event. I want to finish with this slide. It's of a frog Rioak Trackus Silas. I like to call her Silus actually. No, it's a a male name, but Silus will do because it's a nice nice thing to to finish on. There is Silus pickled upside down in a jar in a museum in Australia. It's kind of a sad end because this species is extinct. Um, first recognized in 1973 and probably extinct within a decade. It's a wonderful species. The common name gives it all the way. The southern gastric brooding frog. This frog swallows the fertilized eggs. The female nurtures the eggs in her tongue and then the little froglets emerged. I think that's wonderful. It's such a fantastic example of how incredible the biosphere is. It's even better. This frog could swim frontways and backways. It could hold its breath under water for hours. It's a marvelous animal. It's now extinct. In the 2010s, some scientists thought of deextincting it, bringing it back. But I can tell you, I think Silus is telling you now, don't worry now about the things that are extinct. >> Keep questions short and and snappy. Keep them as questions rather than statements. And that way we can get more questions in. Can we invite some questions now, please? One right at the very back back row. Hello. Thank you. It's It's just a question about your chickens in landfill. Now, I don't eat chicken, but I understand that chicken's legs will be a lot weaker because they're being bred to be so big and not living long. But also, shouldn't we put be putting all our food waste in our food waste bin that won't go to landfill? It'll go for compost. So, how does that affect what you might find out in the future? So, so if I understood you were saying that many people trying to compost chicken bones now, which is a really good thing to do because they will they will compost. Um, and I guess if they're composted, they'll they'll probably leave very little palentological signal for me for me to find. They might leave some kind of chemical signatures. That's possible. that might be longer lived but they wouldn't necessarily leave me a palentological signal but they have already left a massive palentological signal for everything I showed you. Um there are other uh scientists working on recycling things like chicken bones, making them into food stuffs. Um you know, making them into a paste that can be mixed with um materials that would then go into human food stuffs, I think. Um and one could argue that's again a good way of recycling and using everything um in the most efficient ways we can possibly do. Um, but you're right, things in compost probably won't occur in the fossil record. Um, but things in landfills definitely will. One, two, three. Yes. Um do you think there's any evidence of the possibility of humans creating obviously we've because of the homogenization of species due to our desire to eat specific things etc. Uh is there any way that our desire to eat specific things could maybe create new species like we have created like in in food especially in in uh fruits for example there's a lot of things that exist now that wouldn't have ex we've actively created so maybe I suppose do you think that it would be possible for us to consciously increase biodiversity from a a like a agricultural perspective So, so there's already that's a great question and there's already a lot of evidence that that is actually occurring. Um, particularly I think hybridization with plants um because so many plants are being transferred across the planet. I mean there's a a scientist at York Chris Thomas who you may have come across some of his work and Chris has argued actually that we may be in the period of one of the greatest accelerations of speciation in plants in geological history. Um, now that would be great if that's the case. Um, and there's evidence that that, you know, that hybridization and speciation is occurring. Um, but it shouldn't undermine our understanding of the fact that we're actually losing species at an alarming rate. And, um, I think it's it's it's important to try to think about both. So one is yes trying to foster those kind of environments that generate greater speciation. You know the kind of novel ecologies that are developing in cities and in in farms where there's kind of multi-purpose use. Um but I don't think it's I I think we also have to think about all the things we're losing and try not to lose them as well. So it's not a kind of simple one in one out approach. Um, but I think that's a really good question and and yes indeed there is evidence that that that speciation may be accelerating which is which is good. Um, as long as we don't lose all the things we've already got. Hello. Um, that was a fascinating talk and also quite depressing and scary. So I was a we bit surprised at your optimism. I was very pleased to hear that you're optimistic but slightly surprised. One of the slides towards the end you said you were concerned about um particularly concerned about biosphere integrity. One of the other indicators on that slide was climate change now given what we all know about climate change deniers. Isn't there a massive education job here? And are you really optimistic about that that we'll be able to to bring about change by people being better informed and educated? Yes, definitely. I mean that again that's a great question. I think one you have to be optimistic. Um but but there are signs of optimism. Um so um you know there lots of scientists now suggesting that we've got to peak agriculture and therefore peak agriculture might actually allow us to start more land sparing. Um and that's one thing that I think is potentially positive. Um, one of the things I talked about was trying to we talked about biodiversity increase and that's one good thing that humans can do potentially. Um, but we may may actually be able to improve the way we capture biomass um through various kind of agricultural techniques. So that's another kind of positive that that I I take from this. Um, and that doesn't kind of um take away all the problems that climate change is going to present um for um for many ecosystems on planet Earth. And some of the projections are really quite terrifying certainly for lower latitudes both in the oceans and on the land. But but I I see now patterns emerging whereby we may be able to give more space to nature. That's my optimism. And the other part of your question was around education which I think is absolutely critical. Um I also see now lots of people putting in um research proposals for projects that will deal with school level education about the anthroposine for example because the anthroposine's become a kind of touchstone for for all of these different changes. There's a there's a colleague in France who's just won a large grant to do that to go into secondary schools and show what's happening to the system because that's where we really need to be grabbing people's attention. Yeah. So, so there's there although there's lots of things to be pessimistic about and I I know I showed you a lot of pessimistic things, but I kind of have to because I have to show you how the biosphere's changed as a result of human impacts and and the fossil record it's left. But but I think there's everything still to play for and we have to be optimistic and I mean hands up. So how many people in the room have have got a garden and how many of you have left wild spaces in your garden? Because that that's an example of you being a mutualist. Yeah. If you live in a city or the countryside, you can potentially really enhance the biodiversity in your garden by by rewing spaces. My garden, as you can probably imagine, is pretty wild. And and over the past few years, as I've rewalded it, I've just been amazed at the number of insects and mammals um and birds that come into my garden. Now, it was a when I moved into the house, it was an ecological desert, a moan lawn. Um you can barely see a moan lawn now. Um and if you do that, you're being a mutualist. Yes. You're trying to help biodiversity in a small way. It's a small way, but if everybody does that, it will it will help. Certainly will help with the city ecologies. Doesn't help with the consumption patterns, but it's it's going in the right direction. That was great to see so many people put their hand up and say they've wed rewalded their gardens. Um, on the subject of pessimism, Scotland's a good place to come to for pessimism. So, here's one for you. Um, does, as species are interdependent, does survival, the fittest, mean that inevitably all species will become extinct? >> That's a really good question. But but but I would say that Darwin was not completely correct. I don't think that that that the the ecosystems function on a zero sum game. It's not all me and nobody else. As you said, the species interact and actually symbiosis and mutualisms are at least as important. Um we've lost that. We seem to have forgotten that completely. We are just playing a zero- sum game with nature. Yes. Um but that will ultimately pend very badly for us as well. Um but I think again a lot of the work I'm seeing now is really emphasizing the kind of symbiotic relationships. Um and I think that's I was trying to emphasize that and some of the things I was saying. So I think you know Darwin's ideas were good but they were not all the way there. Yeah. And science has evolved a lot over the past um century. Um you know I think things like you know Gaia hypothesis, Lim Margolus, Jim Lovelock all part of that. Yeah. thinking about symbiotic systems at the global planetary level but also at the local ecology level. >> Thank you for your talk. Uh yeah, thanks a lot for your lecture. I since you mentioned that you're on the entropyine working group um I was wondering since last year or a year and a half ago they voted against right um officially uh defining the anthroposine. Could you tell us something about the current work of the group and where it's going after this um sort of closure of the debate for the moment? >> That that's a great question too. So um a year and a half back the international commission on strategraphy or at least its quaternary subcommission voted on whether or not to ratify the anthroposine as a discrete geological division of time. Um we spent 15 years collecting data which I thought we all thought was really profound and I've shown you quite a lot of that data tonight. My own specialty from the biological side but lots of other data. Um the the decision obviously the decision was made. Um we don't agree with it. Um you've probably you may have seen some of the contested battles that have been fought over it in the literature media sites. Um we continue to work as an anthroposine and working group. Um we've now mutated into an independent group. We're no longer part of the international commission on strategraphy. Um we've diversified um the people who who were part of that group which is really important because it was mostly geologists. Not all geologists. quite a few disciplines in the we're carrying on collecting the data and the data we are amassing which I've shown you some of just shows that this is a profound change in the middle part of the 20th century it's it's a macroeolutionary change on the scale of the big changes in deep time so I think in eventually we will be living in the anthroposine it's just what kind of anthroposine we want I think thanks for the question it's a good Thanks very much Mark for a really interesting talk. Um, one of the things that ecologists often do is to look at species abundance and distribution and in part use that as a measure of success. So, I'm thinking of a paleontologist a long time in the future looking at all these chicken bones. May they think chickens ruled the world? Uh, >> yeah. >> And and if you think they won't, why won't they? Because they're going to be everywhere. >> That's that's a great question, Pat. Um, I think so. I would agree that cats rule the world and I think that cats have really been very clever at manipulating humans. Um, you know, and we'll find probably find catbones all across the planet as well. Um, I think the marks the mark of why a future paleontologist would know that the relationship between chickens and humans was not a good one is all the wear marks on the bones from knives and forks and teeth marks. um that will clearly show they were being predated on a massive scale. So I guess arguably you could say that chickens have increased their biomass for and that's that could be seen as evolutionary success. Um it's an interesting philosophical question that one isn't it? I really like that one. But I think all the wear marks will show will show otherwise. you didn't define when a mass extinction occurs. Uh so given the current trends, many of which you showed, if those current trends continue as extrapolated, when do you think that that uh mass extinction might be declared? So a a colleague of mine on the anthroposine working group called Tony Bonoski it's very much his specialty and you might have come across some of his work. um he's the one who's really tried to quantify when he thinks a mass extinction event will occur and I mean he thinks with um present trajectories within two centuries or or much quicker two centuries maximum and that will then leave a very profound signal of human impacts clearly recognizable to crystal ball a question for you given the huge change in the biosphere that the end perian And in the end, Cretaceous created. Would you like to predict what would um how the biosphere would change and what the dominant organisms would be after us? >> That's a that's a Dougal Dixon question. Yes. And uh and I think his is his is rabb best example of that. So you know the rabb in in in in one of his books. Um so this is you know generally species tend to survive ex extinctions. Uh, and um, rabbits may well be one of them because they're all across the planet. Um, and they're pretty good generalists. Um, and you know, so a million years hence you might find mountain rabbits and desert rabbits. Yeah. Um, they look quite different from um, extent rabbits at present, but their their obvious feature will be the really long ears. Yes. Which I thought was wonderful. Um, so I mean it's the generalist that typically survive. Yes. um and then go on to radiate into lots of different um settings. So I could certainly speculate quite clearly about the things that um will survive. I'm sure you could too. Yeah, probably humans because we're super generalists. Yeah, quite possibly we would in a very degraded biosphere. Um cockroaches, rats, rabbits obviously. So um yeah, difficult to speculate but but I mean the patterns that would emerge would be radically different from from what we've seen in the past. Yes. Because the patterns that have controlled radiations after extinctions have been things like geography and uh and and that now is being degraded by human impacts. Yes. There's never been any time in Earth history, even when Pangia was altogether about 250 million years ago, one big superc continent, there's never been the exchange of organisms on the scale that humans have caused in the past century. That's utterly unique. So therefore, the start point will be quite different. Good question. Thanks for a great talk. um in the past 150 years or so the things from human point of view that have happened are um there's many more of us and we consume much much more. Do you think that we can stop uh a mass extinction without dramatically um reducing either our population size consumption or probably both? So, so I that's a great question again and I think that again comes back to this question of where we are with things like agriculture and whether we have indeed reached peak agriculture in terms of the amount of land that we now need need to use to to produce the the biomass that we need need to feed a human population. Um if if we have reached peak agriculture then there's real hope that we can spare a lot of land and therefore hopefully reduce the impacts on the broader biosphere. Um so I am optimistic from that perspective that we can and also you know each and all of us can actually change our behavioral patterns. That's another big part of this. Yeah it's about the way we consume. So there is the city itself and we talked about the the environments in the city. you know, you can rewald them and increase the biodiversity. But when you look at the way a city consumes beyond the immediate vicinity of the city, I mean, Glasgow sits in what would be um I guess would it be a Caledonian forest here or would it be Celtic broadleaf? Some somewhere kind of on the boundary, I think, between those those two biomes. Um but the city doesn't try to interact with those biomes. It's basically shut them out. There's no kind of mutualistic relationship. And then of course a city like Glasgow is consuming on a global basis. It's how we try to pull ourselves back into our local biome to give us a sense of how we can consume in a more moderate manner. And I think there are ways that we can consume in a much more moderate moderate manner. Change your eating habits. That's one thing that we we can all do. Um you know there are really simple engineering things that we can do. I wonder how many buildings in the city capture water on the roof and repurpose it into the into the system. They don't do we don't do these things which are really simple. Some cities do it really well. Um some Belgian cities are really good at repurposing water but we we generally don't. All these things could really help to lower our patterns of consumption um because most consumption is happening in cities. Most pollution is being produced in cities. So um that's almost a whole series of talks in itself I would say but it's a good question but I'm still optimistic that we can but we need to do it quite quickly. >> Just time for one last question and we got two hands up. Felicity could on your right Richard. Um, thank you. That was really interesting. I wanted to ask about the image that you used as the backdrop to your title and to a number of your sort of summarizing slides. Uh, I haven't seen it before. Did you Is it yours? >> No, it's not mine. I've I've given the I just I found it and thought it was such a marvelous way of thinking about um It's a It's actually an amalgam of technos. Not not biological. >> No, I saw goggles and I saw flippers and I think I saw coat hangers >> making up the ver the the the the rim. >> Yeah, it's it's a fantastic work of art. >> The link is in there if you want want to follow it. >> Thank you. I'm sorry. Wasn't a >> I also thought it was a great image. So squeeze one more in. Richard, there's two. Thank you. Although we can't tell what the future will bring, the dominant species on Earth which is causing all this disruption seems to have a peculiar quality of not wanting to reproduce itself in the way it used to. We seem to be as a species when we gain education and more wealth to be less interested in growing our population which is a very peculiar thing I don't think has happened before. I mean that's that's a global trend. Yes. That as societies become more equal um that they gen the the reproduction rate drops. Um and that is good because we've we've obviously crossed the stage of peak population growth. Um and it will probably stabilize sometime in the middle part of the 21st century. And that again is one way I think that buys us hope if we can increase agriculture from less land and spare land for um more of wild nature and that could be one of the bonuses of the 21st century. I'm not worried about population growth slowing down. >> Just before we we uh thank Mark, can I just mention the uh next talk is on the 28th of January. It's entitled The Roots and Fruits of Scotland's Global History and it's by Murray Pitk, Bradley Professor of Literature at the University of Glasgow. We hope we'll see you all then as well. and uh refreshments will be available in a couple of minutes. But firstly, just to thank yourself, Mark, very much indeed from all of us. You've given us a completely different slant I think on humans influence on the planet. Um the planet ruled by chickens and uh I as I ask the audience to to show their thanks, I'll present you with a future fossil which is the paper weight of the society here. They'll be scattered widely through the UK and great to great puzzling future geologists. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye. Thank you.