Since the first prehistoric people started to dig for stone to make implements, rather than pick up loose material, humans have modified the landscape through excavation of rock and soil, generation of waste and creation of artificial ground. In Great Britain over the past 200 years, people have excavated, moved and built up the equivalent of at least six times the volume of Ben Nevis. It is estimated that the worldwide deliberate annual shift of sediment by human activity is 57 000 Mt (million tonnes) and exceeds that of transport by rivers to the oceans (22 000 Mt) almost by a factor of three. Humans sculpt and transform the landscape through the physical modification of the shape and properties of the ground. As such, humans are geological and geomorphological agents and the dominant factor in landscape evolution through settlement and widespread industrialization and urbanization. The most significant impact of this has been since the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, coincident with increased release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The anthropogenic sedimentological record, therefore, provides a marker on which to characterize the Anthropocene.

Abstract:A new lithostratigraphy is presented for the Skiddaw Group (lower Ordovician) of the English Lake District. Two stratigraphical belts are described.

Abstract:The deliberate anthropogenic movement of reworked natural and novel manufactured materials represents a novel sedimentary environment associated with mining, waste disposal, construction and urbanization.

Sinkholes usually have a higher probability of occurrence and a greater genetic diversity in evaporite terrains than in carbonate karst areas. This is because evaporites have a higher solubility, and commonly a lower mechanical strength.Subsidence damage resulting from evaporite dissolution generates substantial losses throughout the world, but the causes are only well-understood in a few areas. To deal with these hazards, a phased approach is needed for sinkhole identification, investigation, prediction, and mitigation. Identification techniques include field surveys, and geomorphological mapping combined with accounts from local people and historical sources. Detailed sinkhole maps can be constructed from sequential historical maps, recent topographical maps and digital elevation models (DEMs) complemented with building-damage surveying, remote sensing, and high-resolution geodetic surveys.On a more detailed level, information from exposed paleosubsidence features (paleokarst), speleological explorations, geophysical investigations, trenching, dating techniques, and boreholes, may help to recognize dissolution and subsidence features.Information on the hydrogeological pathways including caves, springs and swallow holes, are particularly important especially when corroborated by tracer tests. These diverse data sources make a valuable database -the karst inventory. From this dataset, sinkhole susceptibility zonations (relative probability) may be produced based on the spatial and temporal distribution of the features and good knowledge of the local geology. Sinkhole distribution can be investigated by spatial distribution analysis techniques including studies of preferential elongation, alignment and nearest neighbor analysis. More objective susceptibility models may be obtained by analyzing the statistical relationships between the known sinkholes and the conditioning factors, such as weather conditions. Chronological information on sinkhole formation is required to estimate the probability of occurrence of sinkholes (number of sinkholes/km² year).Such spatial and temporal predictions, derived from limited records and based on the assumption that past sinkhole activity may be extrapolated to the future, are noncorroborated hypotheses. Validation methods allow us to assess the predictive capability of the susceptibility maps and to transform them into probability maps. Avoiding the most hazardous areas by preventive planning is the safest strategy for development in sinkhole-prone areas. Corrective measures could be to reduce the dissolution activity and subsidence processes, but these are difficult. A more practical solution for safe development is to reduce the vulnerability of the structures by using subsidence-proof designs.

The transformation of the Earth's land surface by mineral extraction and construction is on a scale greater than natural erosive terrestrial geological processes. Mineral extraction statistics can be used as a proxy to measure the size of the total anthropogenic global sediment flux related to mineral extraction and construction. It is demonstrated that the annual direct anthropogenic contribution to the global production of sediment in 2015 was conservatively some 316 Gt (150 km 3 ), a figure more than 24 times greater than the sediment supplied annually by the world's major rivers to the oceans. The major long-term acceleration in anthropogenic sediment flux started just after the Second World War and anthropogenic sediment flux overtook natural fluvial sediment flux in the mid-1950s. Humans are now the major global geological driving force and an important component of earth system processes in landscape evolution. The changing magnitude of anthropogenic sediments and landforms over time are