The Geology of Landscapes
Times, rhythms, palimpsests of the Rhenish crater
L. Cipriani (TU Delft - Landscape Architecture)
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Abstract
The Rhenish crater is one of Europe’s largest and deepest open-cast coal mines. Humans have transformed the landscape to the point of giving life to a new geological era. The mine is the symbol of humanity’s power over territorial, environmental, and climatic transformations at impressive levels of scale and scope.
This contribution sums up five different times of the Hambach mine landscape, with its rhythms and palimpsests: deep geological time, historical time, the rapid anthropogenic time of excavation, the present time of transition towards new forms of energy, and finally, future time with the conversion of the crater into a lake.