The Anthropocene Age?

[groovedaddy]

Editorial
The AnthropocenePublished: February 27, 2011
Recommend
Twitter

E-Mail

Print


Reprints

Share
Close
LinkedinDiggMixxMySpacePermalink. The edges of historical eras tend to be fuzzy. It would be nice to think that someone awoke in Florence, Italy, one day in the late 1300s — perhaps as spring started— and said, “Today the Renaissance begins!” We can be sure no one did, if only because historians discern such eras only in retrospect. The same is true of geological epochs. Humans existed when the Pleistocene ended and the Holocene began, 11,500 years ago. The geologic time scale, which defines geological periods, began to take its modern form only in the 19th century.

Among scientists, there is now serious talk that the Holocene has ended and a new era has begun, called the Anthropocene, a term first used in 2000 by Paul Crutzen, who shared a Nobel Prize for his work on the chemical mechanisms that affect the ozone layer.

The Royal Society has devoted a recent issue of its Philosophical Transactions to the Anthropocene. According to one of the papers, the name is “a vivid expression of the degree of environmental change on planet Earth.” It means that human activity has left a “stratigraphic signal” detectable thousands of years from now in ice cores and sedimentary rocks.

Those of us alive today may well be able to say we were present when the Anthropocene epoch was formally adopted. But we will not be able to say we were present at the start of the Anthropocene. There is a strong case that the Anthropocene begins with the Industrial Revolution, around 1800, when we began to exert our most profound impact on the world, especially by altering the carbon content of the atmosphere.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/opinion/28mon4.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha211

[HereSince1628]

1. All of us who ate radioactive snow back in the 50's

will provide a significant radiological marker in the geologic record.

[groovedaddy]

2. Reminds me of the study done in St. Louis(?) in the 60s(?) of "baby teeth." Every one of them had

strontium 90 in them - the result of above ground nuclear weapons testing.