THE NEW YORK REVIEW
OF POSTMODERN GEOLOGY
Deconstructing the un-natural history of the anthropocene epoch since 2006
Will the Anthropocene be the first era since the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction in which all rocks get to be famous for 15 minutes?
This brave new epoch has already seen the TV debut of a prime-time worthy gypsum deposit that puts Industrial Light & Magic's best CGI to shame.
The crystal cave's high Nielsen rating created a gold rush of producers seeking out-of-this-world terrestrial geology to televise, and the few geology libraries to survive the Holocene-Anthropocene Extinction have thronged by science writers seeking news of postmodern rock discoveries, including
Trinitite
The earliest dated rock of the Postmodern epoch is a green-violet, obsidian-like fused lithic
The holotype, a thin stratum of un-natural glass emplaced in the White Sands of New Mexico. has a tritium age of 6.9 milli-eons, slightly older than deposits of the Terminal Showa formation that outcrop in Japan's Hiroshima and Nagasaki prefectures, and varous remote locales in Nevada, Kazakhstan, China's Lop Nor basin . Highly enriched in transuranic elements, trinitite specimens look far older than their years.
Tellerite
An ephemeral variety of trinitite that resembles popcorn while it lasts, results from the abrupt explosion of calcium carbonate into porous burnt lime when hydrogen bombs explode over coral.
It was briefly reported on some now vanished Pacific coral atolls, but all the holotype material turned to lime water in the first tropical shower following its discovery
Macadamite
While most sedimentary strata form thick horizontal sheets, hydrocarbon rich macadamite occurs only as thin two dimensional ribbons containing unfossilized flattened faunal remains
Interwoven veins of macadamite of astonishing extent and complexity have been mapped in Southern California, and form a beltway connecting the Cretaceous formations of Maryland & Massachusetts.
Saddamite More mafic than Maccadamite, this high-temperature no-pressure lithic facies results from extreme local heating of holocene tar sands in regions prone to pyromania, including Iraq and Kuwait.
Saddamite consists of sand grains in a matrix of carbon black and pyrolized asphaltenes, a petrogenesis that defies natural explanation. While high nickel and vanadium porphyrin levels suggest an origin in marine cretaceous petroleum, the infernal thermal fluxes needed to generate pure carbon in such amounts only result from the deliberate ignition of oil fields
Cryabase
The new discipline of meteopetrology focuses on cryabase, the only terrestrial rock consisting enirely of condensed air.
Its minerals include native oxygen and nitrogen, ice I & IVcrystals , priestlyite (the carbon analog of silica) ,and minute crystallites of argon, , neon, krypton and Freon.
The sporadic type locality at Cape Canaveral transiently features aircicles and flowstone like crusts on liquid hydrogen tanks, where cryabase avalanches can cause self-inflicted meteor damage to Space Shuttles.
While rare outside the Kuiper Belt, cryabase may become depressingly common in the inner solar system if Senator Inhofe's views on global warming are correct.
Caution should be exercised in collecting cryabase samples, as geologists' picks tend to embrittle severely at frozen air temperatures, and the temptation to lick field samples for a better view of microstructure can lead to severe frostbite of the tongue.
Saganite
A phenomenally cold and dark family of aerosol minerals arbitrarily small amounts of which can reportedly lower global temperatures below freezing for 40 days and 40 nights. The type report published in Science in 1983 seems largely based on the related species, apocryphite, found in many factoid deposits, but lacking the consciousness raising properties of the material originally published .
Saganite exemplifies the unstable minerals grouped as the "factoidite" melange arising from hermeneutic metamorphism during high-pressure deformation professionel
Little is known of its physical properties as despite its extensive literature , it only occurs in nuclear winters. Saganite may be semiotically related to the War of the Worlds symplectite, first reported from Grovers Mills New Jersey by Orson Welles in 1938.
The Tora Bora Metapeltites
Some anthopocene cave deposits in the Hindu Kush and Waziristan syntaxis show signs of shock and awe deformation. Their extensive contamination with shards of lead and depleted uranium frustrated postmodern petrologists seeking to connect them to:
The Ground Zero Gneiss
Known only from deposits in lower Manhattan, this product of political catastophism is a mylonized migmatite containing portlandite, asbestos fibers, enormous laths and corrugated sheets of metallic iron and mica-like sheets of carbonized cellulose with angular markings more legible than graphic granites, many pertaining to world trade.
