It is dark and empty at the bottom of the Gotland Basin in the Baltic Sea, there is hardly any oxygen down there, at a depth of 240 meters.
What is there is a seabed, unruffled by life and turbulent by currents, that preserves what sinks down on it over the years.
A chronicler of what happened much further up, above the water surface, and in the past few decades had to do primarily with people.
In the drill core taken from the East Gotland Basin, the following layers have been preserved since 1950: DDT pesticides, lead, carbon, radioactive nuclides, microplastics, fly ash.
Petra Ahne
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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In the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), next to a photo of the drill core, there is one of a laboratory table with lots of glasses, bottles and tubes.
"Looks messy, but it all makes sense to me!" is written across the top: a research team member's comment about his workplace.
A chunk of ice, a heap of peat
The exhibition “Earth Indices.
The Processing of the Anthropocene”, which can be seen since Friday and until October 19th, is not only about presenting the places that have qualified as geological markers for a new earth epoch called the Anthropocene, like the Gotland Basin, but about the scientific work to address that accompanies this renaming project.
It takes many high-tech steps to isolate from a chunk of Antarctic ice or a pile of peat from a bog in Poland the anthropogenic traces that could persuade the International Commission on Stratigraphy to officially end the Holocene.
The process, which has been going on since 2009, is now entering its critical phase: On Wednesday and Thursday, the members of the Anthropocene Working Group discussed the twelve candidates for the “Golden Spike”, the place where the transition to the new earth epoch can be read stratigraphically leaves.
(FAZ from May 18th).
While the geologists, earth system scientists, ecologists and archaeologists were discussing in the lecture hall, an exhibition was set up in the foyer next door, which shows the subject of this discussion and, by focusing on the working methods of science itself, draws in a meta-level.
The finding that man is now a force that is changing the planet also affects the self-understanding of natural science, which includes researching this against the background of an unchangeable earth system.
Now it turns out: There is hardly a biological, biochemical, geological process left on earth that is not influenced by humans.
This was made possible by technologies created by science.
The exhibition thus captures a historical moment: With their work, researchers contribute to a diagnosis that cannot leave their own discipline untouched and the course of which was set in their own lifetime.
There is now a consensus that the beginning of the Anthropocene dates back to the 1950s, when the diagrams known as the “Great Acceleration” show a steep upward curve.
It is the beginning of western consumer society - and with it the processes that are now destabilizing the earth system.
The fact that humans are changing the climatic conditions that gave rise to civilization is just one of them.