The Anthropocene Surge - evolution, expansion and depth of Vienna's urban environment

The term Anthropocene is widely used today and has come to symbolise human-induced global change, including the current climate crisis. Humans are now also intervening in geological processes and leave clear and growing traces in the most recent geological deposits of the Anthropocene. Using an interdisciplinary approach of geology and archaeology together with the artist Katrin Hornek, the project investigated the growth of these human traces in the underground, especially in the most recent deposits, the Anthropocene of Vienna. These deposits were surveyed, placed on digital maps with the help of geographic information systems (GIS) and existing drilling data base. Excavations in cooperation with the Urban Archaeology Department and the Vienna Museum, the man-made soil was sampled, classified on the basis of its composition and characterised archaeologically and chemically with the help of trace metals such as lead, copper and zinc. This reconstructed the spatial and temporal development of the Anthropocene layers, in geological terms a rapid growth shifting from the 1st district, the Roman city of Vindobona, to the outskirts of the city, such as the Rautenweg landfill. Particularly after the Second World War, rapidly growing areas of rubble formed around the city, man-made mounds of rubbish that have been growing up to three metres a year since the 1960s, giving evidence for the surge-like spread of the Anthropocene in space and time.

The scientific highlight of the project was the excavation in front of the Wien Museum, which revealed evidence of atomic bomb test fallout with the help of traces of plutonium. The soil horizon in front of the Wien Museum on Karlsplatz, which was investigated in teamwork with Karin Hain (Isotope Physics at the University of Vienna), thus demonstrably dates from the period 1952 to 1959 and also shows accumulations of industrial heavy metals such as lead and copper. This worldwide first evidence of man-made plutonium as a possible marker for the base of the Anthropocene in urban deposits was thus one of twelve official candidates for the proposed global reference point (the Golden Spike) of the Anthropocene. The debate about this new, most recent epoch in Earth's history continues to this day, both in the geosciences and among the general public.

As part of the project, the visual artist Katrin Hornek developed the translation into art with several exhibitions and performances that show the digitisation process of man-made deposits and the material flows of the rock samples to various digital data. Katrin Hornek thus traces the points of contact between analogue and digital strata and their potential interaction. Her exhibitions and performances, such as Latent Soils, Modified Grounds, A Landmass to Come und Testing Grounds, also deal with the reference point at Karlsplatz and the plutonium fallout as a signal and memorial for the emerging Anthropocene and the current environmental and climate crisis.