Crawford Lake in Canada marks the beginning of the Anthropocene, a new geologic epoch defined by human impacts on Earth. A group of scientists said Tuesday the best evidence for humanity’s overwhelming impact on the planet could be found here.
Before the Anthropocene can be added to Earth’s 4.6-billion-year official timeline, it must withstand the scrutiny of the wider geology community. In the coming months, the proposal will go before the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, which is responsible for subdividing the history of the last 2.4 million years. Then the larger International Commission on Stratigraphy will vote.
“There’s a very precise geochemical boundary that is present across the planet, across all environments,” said Colin Waters, a geologist at the University of Leicester and chair of the Anthropocene Working Group. But after months of deliberation, the working group’s 22 voting members — including McCarthy and Waters — decided that Crawford Lake captured the evidence for the Anthropocene better than anywhere else. In addition to nuclear fallout, the lake hold signs of industrial pollution, species extinctions and global climate change. Tiny black particles called fly-ash — a byproduct of burning fossil fuels — are laced throughout the sediments.
“It’s not just about climate change. It’s not just biodiversity loss. It’s not just the sediments that humans are moving. It’s all of this together,” said Jürgen Renn, director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, which supported the working group’s research. “We have to address them as a phenomenon that is multiply connected. And we have to make an effort to understand it and adapt our societies accordingly.
All other epochs have been named millennia after they occurred. They are defined not by instrumental data and witness accounts, but by the records of environmental change stored in rocks, tree rings, sediments and ice. A
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