You are hereForum / High Sierra Backpacking Topics / High Sierra Mountain NEWS: Alerts, Weather, Conditions, Events, Nature, Trails, Science, Government and More / All Eco-Crash, Climate Change News / 2019 Eco Crash News: The Changing Climate, the Anthropocene, & Associated Effects / Summer & Fall of 2019 Eco Crash News / Land Use, Erosion, and Climate Change's Ancient and Modern Relationship

Land Use, Erosion, and Climate Change's Ancient and Modern Relationship

By Alex Wierbinski - Posted on 31 October 2019

ECO-CRASHING NEWS: LAND USE, EROSION, AND MORE RAIN

Is this What Happened to Summer, Ur, & Babaylon?

Erosion caused by agriculture is a major cause of land degradation. Photo by Rick Bohn / United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

Its Ancient Beginning: Massive Climate Feedback Loop Well Underway

Human Activities Boosted Global Soil Erosion Already 4,000 Years Ago,
Institut national de la recherche scientifique - INRS, October 28, 2019.

MAIN POINTS

Ancient Land Use Erosion
"...recorded temporal changes of soil erosion by analyzing sediment deposits in more than 600 lakes worldwide. They found that the accumulation of lake sediments increased significantly on a global scale around 4,000 years ago. At the same time, tree cover decreased as shown by pollen records, which is a clear indicator of deforestation. The study suggests that human practices and land-use change have intensified soil erosion long before industrialization."

Falling Ancient Civilizations
''This means that land use had a major impact as many as 4000 years ago, when the human population was much lower than it is today. Our ecosystems are extremely sensitive to modifications to land use."

Stripping Local Lands
"Collectively, this study suggests that the change in tree abundance in lake catchments has long been the leading factor driving soil erosion. Furthermore, anthropogenic deforestation explains the accelerated soil erosion during the last four millenia."

Now Stripping the Whole Thing
"Well before the more recent and abrupt influences by greenhouse gas emissions, human activities must have influenced the global environment already 4,000 years ago."

Bottom Line

Human land use creating and coupled to atmospheric changes have induced a, "perfect storm," combination of conditions that are accelerating our contemporary erosive release of vast stores of carbon currently tied-up in land and rock.

The accelerated ancient erosion caused by the forces of Human land use, mentioned in the research above, combined with the vast numbers of us modern industrial (and post-industrial) folk stripping a big percentage of the remaining natural forest and vegetation cover from this planet, as our simultaneous heating of the atmosphere has supercharged the melting of mountain glaciers while transforming Wintertime snow-covered mountains into wet Winter ranges.

These, our massive modern, "land uses," have not just physically accelerated local erosive forces, but the byproducts of the energy usage necessary for us to execute our, "land uses," have globally accelerated extreme precipitation as well as extreme drought.

Oct 2018
CLIMATE CRASHING: EXTREME WEATHER, The Fun's Just Getting Started

Old Carbon
The combination of our contemporary changes to Air, Sea, and Land have only just begun opening the, "temperature locks," that have been holding vast amounts of carbon physically woven up into land. sea, and ice for many tens of thousands of years.

This carbon is not just, "woven," into the compositions of rock, ocean waters, and soils, but this carbon has also been tied-up into the vast food chains living in or on these mediums for at least the last forty thousand years, since before the beginning of our last period of extensive glaciation that we came out of ten thousand years ago. We are opening it all up.

Rain-Erosion Feedback Loop
2019: PETM Storm Feedback Loop Deepens & Extends High CO2 Concentrations

Undersea Hydrates
Undersea Gases Could Superheat the Planet

Very Old Carbon
If I'm correct, and we are now accessing carbon that was last free before the last ice age and its cycle of glaciations, then we are slowly but inextricably sliding into the End of Cold, into a planet with zero ice and ice ages, let alone glaciated periods. When I say, "The End of Cold," I mean The End of Cold.

Our Final Stretch
I'm thinking it will finally take a couple of hundred more years for us to finally and fully manifest (and understand) the full consequences of our long and accelerating policies of destructive growth and development. These consequences will likely be manifested by disasterous climate events. In a hundred years we humans will likely be watching the half-melted and rapidly melting wrecks of Greenland and Antarctica in full transition to California-like climates as California and the whole Southwest US finishes its shift into a superheated megadesert climate.

Final Understanding
Maybe at that point we will finally understand that the consequences of our contemporary greedy ignorance are going to be playing themselves out through hundreds of thousands of years of seriously degraded life and fertility for everything remaining on this planet, far into this planet's future, after we're finally through unbalancing it all.

Future Hope
Rebinding the Carbon

Sampling Ancient Sediment Cores

Institut national de la recherche scientifique, picture by Jean-Philippe-Jenny.