First media feature on "Taming Time" is out
- Oct 6, 2023 at "Campus Leben" - webpage of Freie Universität Berlin,
- Oct 8, 2023 in Berlin "Tagesspiegel - Sonntag" (newspaper supplement of the Freie Universität).
- Oct 8, 2023 via News section of Faculty of Geosciences, Freie Universität Berlin.
The original article by journalist Catarina Piechmann is in German, below are some excerpts in English:
How the Book of Earth History got a new chapter
In his "science graphic novel" on the Anthropocene, Reinhold Leinfelder lets time itself do the talking
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The Earth got along quite well without us. On its own, it has undergone a unique development in more than 4.5 billion years. But for a "short while" we humans have been around and are so massively over-shaping its work that geologists want to proclaim a new Earth Age: Researchers have found unmistakable markers of the new chapter, which replaces the Holocene, in sediments all over the world and in Crawford Lake, Canada, as an example. For the geobiologist and palaeontologist Reinhold Leinfelder, this was the reason to let time itself tell the story of how this came about in a comic-like "science graphic novel".
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With this, he wants to awaken an understanding for geological time scales and the "Great Acceleration" in which we are currently living. "People often say: 'It's not all that bad, because that's what happened in the past.' For example, that the colourful shallow-water coral reefs have died out. But the fact that it once took five, and another time even 140 million years for them to come back is little known," says Reinhold Leinfelder, a member of the International Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) and retired professor at the Free University of Berlin.
The working group advises the "Parliament of Time", as the International Commission on Stratigraphy is called in the comic. It was commissioned, so to speak, by this "UN of geologists" to find out whether it makes sense to proclaim an Anthropocene. And, if so, how it should be defined.
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Alexandra Hamann and illustrator Maki Shimizu were again involved, supported by graphic designer Ines Gomes Ferreira. And so, in collaboration with other members of the AWG, "Taming Time - A Golden Spike for the Anthropocene" came into being.
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Earth history for all
With this graphic novel, the project team has succeeded in creating a very amusing journey through the history of the Earth, bursting with quirky characters and easily digestible knowledge. Worth reading not only for researchers, but for anyone interested in earth and climate history. "Taming Time" can initially be downloaded in English from the Refubium-Server of Freie Universität and will later also be published as a large-format book and in several languages.
Students will of course recognise parts of Reinhold Leinfelder's lectures on Earth history, reefs and the Anthropocene, which is a kind of farewell gift to his university. Last but not least, it is also a homage to Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen (1933 - 2021), who proclaimed at a conference in 2000: "We no longer live in the Holocene. We live in the Anthropocene!" - and thus opened a new chapter in the history of the Earth.
FURTHER INFORMATION
Graphic Novel “Taming Time: A Golden Spike for the Anthropocene” as eBook-PDF in Refubium , the open access repository of Freie Universität Berlin
(above is an excerpt from https://www.fu-berlin.de/campusleben/forschen/2023/231007-tsp-antropozaen/index.html (translated)), nearly identical also published in https://www.tagesspiegel.de/comic-zum-anthropozan-wie-das-buch-der-erdgeschichte-ein-neues-kapitel-bekam-10576381.html
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