Scientists reveal that the Anthropocene, the geological era of human impact on Earth, has already begun

A group of scientists on Tuesday unveiled the geologic site that they believe shows the Anthropocene, the geological epoch caused by human activity, has already begun.

That small freshwater reservoir, Crawford Lake, contains sediments with traces of microplastics, ash deposited from burning oil and coal over decades, and even traces of distant nuclear explosions, according to data from the Anthropocene Working Group.

This announcement does not mean that the scientific term, which has been circulating among experts for more than two decades, will become part of the planet Earth’s calendar, which began about 4.6 billion years ago.

The history of planet Earth is divided into epochs, periods, epochs and geological epochs. We are currently in the Cenozoic, Quaternary, Holocene.

According to climate scientists and environmentalists, who especially demand an end to fossil fuels, man’s need for energy and food is leading the planet to a decisive environmental crisis.

Geologists who have joined this cause believe that the Anthropocene can be classified as a new epoch, by which we would have left the Holocene.

What is the Anthropocene

The concept of “human age” was first proposed in 2002 by Nobel Prize winner in chemistry Paul Crutzen, who estimated that it could be applied since the mid-20th century.

It coincides with rising concentrations of greenhouse gases, microplastic pollution, radioactive waste from nuclear tests, and a dozen other features of our species’ growing influence on the planet.

Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize for identifying man-made chemicals that destroy the protective ozone layer, hoped the concept and reality of the Anthropocene would be a wake-up call to the challenges ahead.

The nine Anthropocene sites

Between 2009 and 2015, an international group of geologists, including Sweden’s Johan Rockström and American Will Steffen, along with their colleagues at the Stockholm Resilience Center, drew up a list of nine planetary boundaries that would be extremely dangerous to cross. Here are the nine sites that he says demonstrate the impact of this human activity.

These sites have not been specifically selected because they have changed catastrophically – on the contrary, there are many more who have been luckier – but because they have captured and collected sediments and chemical particles that allow us to date with some precision the moment when human activity – or rather, capitalist production and exploitation – had a significant impact on the Earth’s ecology.

Expert disagreement

The main difficulty for geologists and scientists defending the cause of the Anthropocene is the importance of that impact in relative terms, compared to our planet’s very long chronology.

Humans’ environmental impact is undeniable, but experts from the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS, the highest institution in the field) disagree on how to characterize their weight compared to a calendar that is changing very slowly, over millions of years.

If aliens landed on Earth a million years from now and examined the rocks and sediments, could they detect a significant enough trace of humanity’s passage?

This Tuesday’s working group meeting responds unequivocally: Humans have already created the planet from the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago, after several ice ages.

Other experts, on the other hand, believe that we are simply in an interglacial period, like many others that the Earth has already experienced.

And that includes enormous variations in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Confirming the importance of the Anthropocene would force us to think about humanity’s impact on the environment.