Anthropocene from Sky

There were once dinosaurs, they didn't build large scale dams!!! they didn't built cities and they didn't build empires. There were huge mammoths, they didn't build large scale dams, and they also didn't build cities or empires. But some 70 thousands years ago, a curious species started to look beyond its horizon. Curiosity turned into exploration, exploration turned into expansion and expansion turned into invasion. Curiosity, exploration and expansion drove this species from one end of world to other end; exploring like no other species have done before; expanding like no other species, invading like no other species and finally destroying like no other species. This is curious case of Human Species i.e. "Curious Case of Homo Sapiens".

The Anthropocene defines Earth's most recent geologic time period as being human-influenced, or anthropogenic, based on overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and other earth system processes are now altered by humans.

The word combines the root "anthropo", meaning "human" with the root "-cene", the standard suffix for "epoch" in geologic time.

Anthropocene is age of humans; their changes that are impacting earth at an epic scale. It epoch where things done by just one species is having an impact at planetary scale. We can now dry up an entire sea, we as species can deforest or aforest an entire area of thousands of kilometres. We as species can divert an entire river and can also create an entire new water ecosystem. This kind of power though dangerous and some what though provoking, is being practiced or know to only one species on planet earth ; Thats "Homo Sapiens" aka "anthros" aka "human beings".

What homo sapiens used to do or did has been recorded in history in one or the other form; but its only in 20 th and 21 st century we are able to see it happening through our eyes in epic proportion. The capability that I am talking about is "Earth Observation". We humans got this capability by the moment we launched our first satellite in to the space. But its in the last quarter of 20 th century and 1 st quarter of 21 st century , this capability or technology became democratized and hence now every one is able to observe how the earth looks like from sky.

Google Earth is one such beautiful, simple and elegant software which helps us to observe earth. Combine this with any movie maker; we can truly witness Anthropocene. I recently have created certain videos using Google Earth and Power point. These will give landscape changes over the time and scale. Time period used for this was from 1984 to 2016.

Anthropocene 1 : Aral Sea

Aral Sea is the perfect example of how not to plan agricultural systems; its best example of human created ecological disaster!!!

This is how Aral Sea; once jewel on ancient civilization is described now a day. Formerly the fourth largest lake in the world with an area of 68,000 km2 (26,300 sq mi), the Aral Sea has been shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects.

By 1997, it had declined to 10% of its original size, splitting into four lakes: the North Aral Sea, the eastern and western basins of the once far larger South Aral Sea, and one smaller intermediate lake.By 2009, the southeastern lake had disappeared and the southwestern lake had retreated to a thin strip at the western edge of the former southern sea; in subsequent years, occasional water flows have led to the southeastern lake sometimes being replenished to a small degree. Source : Wikipedia

This type of lake disappearance is unheard of. By using earth observation we can re-create this event in space and time. We have stitched images together to form video. We need to thank democratization of the satellite images and the software that makes satellite visualization easy. Satellite images like Sentinal and Landsat and Software like Google Earth Pro are perfect example for this democratized world. There are many paid SaaS in the market Esri Softwares, Planet viewer, which can also be used for nominal fee.

Below is the temporal series of full motion that shows Aral Lake from 1984 to 2016. From the 1984 image we can see that Aral Sea was actually drying up well before. This is shown when 1 st frame -1974- is compared with 1984 image. As usage of water went of increasing, the lake started disappearing slowly. By 2000s this rate of disappearance accelerated and reached its peak in 2010. 2010 marked the least area covered by lake.

By 2000s world has woken up to the this man made disaster and restoration project with the help of UN has started. It takes huge time to restore the degraded to its original state. Efforts have paid off and the lake has started to rejuvenate. Lot of efforts are being made to reverse the human's first ecological disaster in coming years. Restoration efforts in full swing in all the catchment area of this lake. It would be interesting example for future generation that we humans can make mistake and also can learn from the mistake and rectify it.

Anthropocene 1 : Dubai Coast

While observing coastline of Dubai using Google Earth's time line, I was surprised to see development of Palm Islands and its adjacent islands from 2000-01. Its interesting to see these mini man made island from the sky. So, I decide to create time series video for Dubai. This video capture Dubai from 1984 and runs till 2016. Hence newly build islands are not visible. These islands are the observed changes at planetary (Mirco) scale. Some might argue that it may not qualify for planetary scale; but by seeing the seer scale of development I want to keep this in my list of Anthropocene.

All this happened post oil boom when middle eastern countries started to get huge benefits for the crude oil. To decrease the over dependency on the oil, an entire industry based on tourism was designed. All these islands are part of the plan.

There has not been any research on the impact of these anthropocentric activity near the coast and hence i can't comment on that. But this visualization given below does gives reader a fair idea of what micro level Anthropocene is!!!

Anthropocene , as human influence is undoubtedly very great. We have changed a lot at planetary scales. However, when i was writing this article , a virus has forced all the human species to be inside their homes. Air got cleaner within 1 month, water in river started getting clean. For nearly a month, it seems as if nature has recaptured the Earth from Homo Sapiens. And it reminds me that Anthropocene is just a passing era for Earth, where one Species dominates part of Earth in its own way and as era passes it dwindle in the history of time and space.