Articles | Volume 2, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/hgss-2-57-2011
https://doi.org/10.5194/hgss-2-57-2011
04 Mar 2011
 | 04 Mar 2011

Anthropic Rock: a brief history

R. B. Cathcart

Abstract. Stone tool-making is a reductive process. Synthetic rock manufacturing, preeminently an additive process, will not for-ever be confined to only the Earth-biosphere. This brief focuses on humanity's ancient past, hodiernal and possible future even more massive than present-day creation of artificial rocks within our exploitable Solar System. It is mostly Earth-centric account that expands the factual generalities underlying the unique non-copyrighted systemic technogenic rock classification first publicly presented (to the American Geological Society) during 2001, by its sole intellectual innovator, James Ross Underwood, Jr. His pioneering, unique exposition of an organization of this ever-increasingly important aspect of the Anthropic Rock story, spatially expansive material lithification, here is given an amplified discussion for the broader geo and space science social group-purpose of encouragement of a completer 21st Century treatment of Underwood's explicative subject-chart (Fig. 2).