Mar 7, 2024 09:01 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 8, 2024 07:35 AM by C C.)
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00675-8
EXCERPTS: After 15 years of discussion and exploration, a committee of researchers has decided that the Anthropocene — generally understood to be the age of irreversible human impacts on the planet — will not become an official epoch in Earth’s geologic timeline. The ruling, first reported by the New York Times, is meant to be final, but is being challenged by the chair and a vice-chair of the committee that ran the vote.
[...] If successful, the proposal would have ended the current Holocene epoch, which has been going on since the end of the last ice age 11,700 years ago, and started the Anthropocene in the year 1952. This is when plutonium from hydrogen-bomb tests showed up in the sediment of Crawford Lake near Toronto, a site chosen by some geologists as capturing a pristine record of humans’ impact on Earth. Other signs of human influence include microplastics, pesticides and ash from fossil-fuel combustion.
But pending the resolution of the challenge, the lake and its plutonium residue won’t get a ‘golden spike’ designation from geologists now.
[...] Although the Anthropocene probably will not not be added to the geologic timescale, it remains a broad cultural concept already used by many to describe the era of accelerating human impacts, such as climate change and biodiversity loss...
[...] "To be honest, I am very disappointed with the SQS outcome,” says Yongming Han, another working group member and a geochemist at the Institute of Earth Environment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Xi’an. “We all know that the planet has entered a period in which humans act as a key force and have left indisputable stratigraphic evidences.” (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: After 15 years of discussion and exploration, a committee of researchers has decided that the Anthropocene — generally understood to be the age of irreversible human impacts on the planet — will not become an official epoch in Earth’s geologic timeline. The ruling, first reported by the New York Times, is meant to be final, but is being challenged by the chair and a vice-chair of the committee that ran the vote.
[...] If successful, the proposal would have ended the current Holocene epoch, which has been going on since the end of the last ice age 11,700 years ago, and started the Anthropocene in the year 1952. This is when plutonium from hydrogen-bomb tests showed up in the sediment of Crawford Lake near Toronto, a site chosen by some geologists as capturing a pristine record of humans’ impact on Earth. Other signs of human influence include microplastics, pesticides and ash from fossil-fuel combustion.
But pending the resolution of the challenge, the lake and its plutonium residue won’t get a ‘golden spike’ designation from geologists now.
[...] Although the Anthropocene probably will not not be added to the geologic timescale, it remains a broad cultural concept already used by many to describe the era of accelerating human impacts, such as climate change and biodiversity loss...
[...] "To be honest, I am very disappointed with the SQS outcome,” says Yongming Han, another working group member and a geochemist at the Institute of Earth Environment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Xi’an. “We all know that the planet has entered a period in which humans act as a key force and have left indisputable stratigraphic evidences.” (MORE - missing details)
