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After almost 15 years of deliberations, a ruling by geologists on Tuesday It seems almost anticlimactic: Our species has not altered our world so radically as to have begun a new chapter in its history, at least not yet, a panel of academics decided.
But even if textbooks and research papers don’t mention the “Anthropocene” epoch anytime soon, Earth scientists have no doubt that humans are changing the planet. In deciding whether or not to modify the geological timeline to reflect this, they contemplated a variety of human-driven changes that will be marked in the rocks for a long time.
In the end, several scholars who voted on the Anthropocene question said that humanity had left too many different kinds of imprints on nature, over too long a period of time, to be clearly captured by a single starting point, which is what requires geological timing.
These are some of the planetary changes they considered.
nuclear fallout
A key part of the case What some scientists did to declare the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch was the pulse of radioactive isotopes that hundreds of nuclear detonations spread across the Earth in the mid-20th century. There is no doubt that humans are responsible for these particles, even if they end up in different places at slightly different times.
However, some academics have expressed concern about whether using weapons of mass destruction to signal humanity’s transformation of the planet would send the wrong message about our times.
Changes in biodiversity
Fossilized life tells scientists a lot about what Earth was like in its deep past, and will no doubt continue to do so as future researchers attempt to study our time. Not only are we losing species at a rapid rate, but we have also altered the places where they live and thrive (or fail to thrive), both by destroying their habitats and by domesticating them for agriculture and companionship.
Changing terrain
Our civilization moves and modifies the ground beneath us in very direct ways. We flatten hills to build cities and farm. We excavate the earth to extract resources or bury waste. We dammed the rivers, preventing them from transporting mud and soil from the continents to the seas. World, for an estimateThe total volume of sediment that humans move each year is now more than 24 times the amount contributed by rivers.
Fossil fuels
The burning of fossil fuels is adding huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane to the atmosphere, which together are warming the Earth’s surface and oceans. Temperatures are already rapidly moving away from their relatively stable levels during the current geological epoch, the Holocene. That’s the period that began 11,700 years ago, when melting glaciers made many parts of the planet habitable for humans.
But industrial activity is also leaving another kind of lasting legacy: ash from the combustion of coal and fuel oil is reaching lake beds, sediments and the seabed.
Plastics and other pollutants
Industrial ashes are not the only type of matter that will remain in the mineral record as a distinctive marker of our time. There are also pesticides, plastics, heavy metals, concrete and fertilizers, not to mention garbage of all kinds from landfills.
