9/8/2023 0 Comments Shock to the system t shirtNext, the International Commission on Stratigraphy will vote on whether the Anthropocene deserves to be designated a new epoch. The Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy will consider the proposal in the next few months. McCarthy, an earth scientist at Brock University in Ontario and a member of the AWG.ĭoes this officially mean we’re living in a new epoch? “The record at Crawford Lake is representative of the changes that make the time since the mid-20th century geologically different from before,” said Francine M.G. Since 1950 - which is when the AWG now says the Anthropocene began - the sediment there has been inundated by the byproducts of human activity: plutonium isotopes from the nuclear bombs we’ve detonated, ash from the fossil fuels we’ve burned, and nitrogen from the fertilizer we’ve used. There, the waters are so deep that whatever sinks down to the floor usually remains without mixing with the upper layers of water, so it stays preserved, offering an unusually good record of geological change. It’s little Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada. In 2009, they started hunting around the planet and found a range of strong candidates, from a peat bog in Poland to a coral reef in Australia to the ice of Antarctica.īut the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), as the group is called, wanted to pick a site where the rock record indisputably shows that we’ve left behind the Holocene epoch, which started 11,700 years ago when the last ice age ended.Īt last, the geologists say, they’ve found their holy grail. To prove that the Anthropocene represents a new one, scientists had to find a “golden spike” - a physical site where the rock, sediment, or ice clearly records the change from a previous chapter in time to a new one. On Tuesday, they declared they’ve found it.Įarth has gone through distinct geological epochs, vast chunks of time defined by changes in rock layers. An intrepid band of geologists has spent over a decade scouring the planet for the evidence they need to declare we’re living in the Anthropocene, a new chapter in Earth’s history borne of humanity’s impact on the planet.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |