Over the last 4 billion years, the Earth’s climate has been constantly changing, from the warm waters where life first formed, to the freezing conditions where ice covered much of the Earth’s surface. For most of Earth’s history, climate has been driven by natural processes such as changes in the shape of our orbit around the sun, the amount of energy emitted from the Sun, and movements of the Earth’s crust. But now due to the profound impacts of humanity on the Earth’s surface, we may be shifting into a new climatic age: an age of plastic bags, radioactive fallout, mass extinctions, and environmental destruction. Welcome to the Anthropocene!

Join a team of Physical Geographers from the University of Manchester as we explore the impact of humanity on the fragile world we live in. Learn about how plastics move through the environment, examine the legacy of industrial pollution in the North West, see the tiny fossils hidden in our everyday environment that we use to define the Anthropocene, understand how we exploit our natural resources, and find out about the work we are doing to combat local landscape degradation.

We’ll be asking you to turn the telescope on our pale blue dot – can you help us decide what scientists of the future will use to define our environmental legacy?