Anthropogeomorphology
Anthropogeomorphology is a word that some geologists use to describe the ways in which human beings have become a major participant in the geologic processes of the Earth. Just as tectonic plates, volcanoes, and running water continually sculpt the surface of the Earth, so do humans. In the 20th Century, for example, human activities such as mining, dredging, agriculture, and industry have moved at least as much rock and sediment as any other earth process.

If we try to see think of the human landscape in terms of geology, a fantastic world opens up to us: buildings are temporary mineral deposits, mountain-moving and mining are accelerated processes of erosion, and global warming is akin to climactic fluctuation, not dissimilar to an ice-age. Thinking geologically, these human processes become earth processes – forces, like the weather, which contribute to the planets’ constant state of flux. That life shapes the geology of the Earth is not particular to the present era. Since its appearance on dry ground, life has always significantly impacted the shape of the landscape.

The Silurian period, from 443 to 417 million years ago, saw the first of the vascular plants, which dramatically changed the forces that were until then responsible for various forms of land cover. In the Pre-Silurian era, there was very little soil, and wind was very important in creating erosion. Streams and rivers were generally shallow and braided, because their banks lacked plant roots to hold the earth together. When plants and animals took to the land, they completely changed its form. Chemical reactions between terrestrial life and the planets' surface created large amounts of soil, and streams gave way to deeper rivers as vegetation began to stabilize the earth along their banks. But humans can literally move mountains in very short periods of time.

Some geologists, noting the magnitude of transformations humans have wrought on the land, have suggested that recent developments in human technology and land-use might be the beginning of an Anthropocene age - an age in which humans and their machines are a dominant geologic force. But whether the effects of human activity prove to be a momentary aberration or a lasting transformation of the land will almost assuredly never be known by humans. But we do know that human activity will never be entirely erased from the Earth. There will always be remnants of the Anthropocene age in future layers of sediment.

Human activities will become like prehistoric forests and swamps now existing as layers of coal deep in the earth, or prehistoric animals transmuted into pockets of underground natural gas. In geologic time, life is a peculiar kind of rock, plants are living coal, and flesh is a temporary state of gas.