Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
That headline Science or strategy? Researchers call for transparency over the Anthropocene rejection refers to the fallout from March 2024, when the Anthropocene as a formal geological epoch was voted down, and to a long- running critique coming out of the Max Planck Society.
Researchers aligned with Max Planck argue that without published criteria, open peer review of the vote, and inclusion of social scientists and humanists, we can’t tell the difference, and that opacity undermines trust.
There is the new paper, Schäfer et al. 2026 in Earth’s Future: “Science or Strategy? The Rejection of the Anthropocene Epoch Demands Transparency”
It comes from researchers linked to the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena. It doesn’t argue to relitigate the stratigraphy. It argues the process of the rejection itself was opaque.
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That headline Science or strategy? Researchers call for transparency over the Anthropocene rejection refers to the fallout from March 2024, when the Anthropocene as a formal geological epoch was voted down, and to a long- running critique coming out of the Max Planck Society.
For almost 15 years the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) worked to put the “age of humans” on the official geologic timescale.
They proposed:
Start date: 1952, linked to the global spike of plutonium from nuclear weapons tests
Golden spike location: Crawford Lake, Ontario
Rationale: rapid acceleration of greenhouse gases, biodiversity loss, plastics, concrete, etc. since the 1950s
In March 2024 the proposal was rejected.
The Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) voted it down, and on 20 March the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), the final arbiter, announced it was upholding that decision.
Reports described it as a highly contested decision in March 2024, with a 12 to 4 vote to reject.
The debate didn’t end with the vote, it intensified. Two camps of criticism emerged:
1. Scientific critique: Critics argue the plutonium spike itself is not a direct stratigraphic marker of anthropogenic Earth- system change, that the ∼70- year interval is too short for an epoch, and that evidence of human impacts are diachronous in the geological record.
2. Procedural ans strategy critique:Supporters of the AWG said the vote was leaked to media before the AWG was officially informed, violated the 60% supermajority procedures, and flew in the face of evidence presented. That’s where the transparency call comes in.
This is not new for Max Planck.
In 2016, Nicole Boivin, then Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, and colleagues published a Comment in Nature arguing that the soon- to- be- finalized decision was inaccurate and hasty, and that its formalization must be the result of a transparent, broad based, interdisciplinary process.
They explicitly called for the criteria for the formalization to be published and peer reviewed, rather than established in closed meetings, and for at least half the commission to come from anthropology, archaeology, history, sociology, geography and philosophy- not just stratigraphy.
The newer work coming from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology (MPI- GEA), including Jürgen Renn, Georg Schäfer and colleagues, makes a similar point after the 2024 rejection:
The rejected recognition of an Anthropocene epoch has not ended the Anthropocene debate, rather it underscores that the decisive question is less stratigraphic than political
Their argument:
The Anthropocene should not be reduced to a single GSSP (plutonium line). Human impacts started as “a whisper, became a voice and then a scream”, megafaunal extinctions, fire, agriculture, irrigation, urbanization, thousands of years before 1950.
Focusing only on 1950s markers sustains a narrow, Eurocentric, elite view of industrial society as the only cause.
Geoanthropology needs open epistemic webs that link models, data, and publics, and decision infrastructures that are auditable, hence the call for transparency.
In other words:Was the 2024 rejection a strictly scientific judgment that the evidence doesn’t meet chronostratigraphic rules? Or was it a strategic move to protect the stability of the timescale and avoid a very short, highly political epoch?
Researchers aligned with Max Planck argue that without published criteria, open peer review of the vote, and inclusion of social scientists and humanists, we can’t tell the difference, and that opacity undermines trust.
Even though the epoch was not formalized, the term is alive:
Nature Reviews Earth & Environment now frames the debate as epoch vs. event, epoch (a formal break after the Holocene) vs. event (a cumulative, time- transgressive transformation analogous to the Great Oxidation Event)
Many Earth- system scientists continue to use Holocene vs. Anthropocene informally in planetary boundaries work, regardless of the official timescale.
If you want the original sources, I can pull the 2016 Boivin et al. Nature comment Involve social scientists in defining the Anthropocene and the 2024-2025 Renn et al. MPI- GEA preprint The Decision for the Anthropocene – Between Activism, Doubt and Responsibility.
Science or Strategy? The Rejection of the Anthropocene Epoch Demands Transparency
There is the new paper, Schäfer et al. 2026 in Earth’s Future: “Science or Strategy? The Rejection of the Anthropocene Epoch Demands Transparency”
It comes from researchers linked to the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena. It doesn’t argue to relitigate the stratigraphy. It argues the process of the rejection itself was opaque.
What happened
In March 2024, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) upheld the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy’s (SQS) decision to formally reject the Anthropocene Working Group’s (AWG) proposal
Despite the outcome, the AWG continues to publish evidence that the authors say meets established standards, a globally synchronous plutonium signal and 12 depositional environments.
The problem, they say, is not that rejection is impossible, but that the manner of rejection remains unexplained.
What is problematic is the manner in which this rejection occurred.
The scientific basis for rejection therefore remains opaque.
Documented procedural violations they list
1. Violation of SQS chair’s rights: the vote was called against the expressed will of the chair who according to the Statutes is leader of the Subcommission
2. Invalid voting process:
11 of the 16 members who cast votes were ineligible under ICS Rule 9, their terms having exceeded the 12- year limit, leaving eligible members short of quorum
Valid Standard Auxiliary Boundary Stratotypes proposals were excluded from deliberation despite meeting ICS requirements
3. Compromised evaluation: The AWG received no opportunity to respond to comments, including those that revealed misconceptions, or to revise the proposal, counter to ICS procedure that a proposal must receive extended opportunity for open discussion. The matter then passed to a quickly convened ICS meeting from which the SQS Chair was excluded and on to IUGS ratification within days.
4. Suppression of ethics oversight: The IUGS’s own Commission on Geoethics submitted a report in January 2024 concluding the AWG had been unfairly treated and recommending immediate suspension of voting procedures. The Executive Committee ignored it, forwarding the report only after results leaked via the New York Times. That Geoethics report remains publicly inaccessible.
They also cite earlier suppression: at STRATI 2023 in Lille, the AWG’s press conference was withdrawn from the venue and media were instructed not to interview AWG members inside.
And the Geoethics Commission itself was then disestablished on 28 April 2025 with the justification that its objectives do not offer sufficient interest, only reinstated in June 2025 on an interim basis without financial support.
Science or Strategy?
The core question they pose:
Was the AWG proposal rejected on scientific grounds, such as methodological concerns, marker inadequacy, disputes over the timing of the boundary, or did institutional politics and strategic gatekeeping prove decisive?
Until today, neither SQS, ICS, nor IUGS explained the evidentiary threshold by which it was judged inadequate.
What they demand
They explicitly say:
We are not calling for reversal of the IUGS decision, nor seeking to relitigate the stratigraphic evidence… We call for transparency.
Two steps:
1. Full disclosure of relevant documentation, including the IUGS Commission on Geoethics report, SQS voting records, and communications 2. Independent review commissioned by a body independent of the IUGS, such as the International Science Council
Their argument: The Anthropocene concept has long transcended geoscience, archaeology, history, ecology, law, public discourse, and if decisions as consequential as this can be made behind closed doors, geoscience’s capacity to inform society is diminished.
In a recent Earth’s Future article, Skelton and Noone (2025, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024ef005719) crystallized the dilemma facing the geoscientific community: the Anthropocene Working Group’s (AWG) evidentiary case for an Anthropocene epoch is at least as strong as, and in their view stronger than, that for the Holocene. Yet a substantive scientific debate cannot proceed until the reasons for the rejection of the AWG’s proposal to formalize the Anthropocene as a geological epoch are made transparent. Often framed as a question of stratigraphic markers and boundary criteria, the Anthropocene controversy now turns on a more fundamental issue: whether current institutional practices for establishing geological time units meet the transparency and procedural standards expected in times of heavy public reliance on Earth-system expertise. Drawing on surfaced communications, public statements, independent reporting and publicly available documentation, we identify unresolved procedural irregularities in the evaluation of the AWG proposal, including questions about voter eligibility and quorum, restricted access to key documents, and the handling of an IUGS-commissioned geoethics report. These matters have not been addressed in a systematic or public way. We argue that clarifying the basis of the decision—scientific or otherwise—is essential to preserve trust in stratigraphic governance and, by extension, in the institutions that underpin global environmental knowledge. We therefore call for full disclosure of the relevant documentation and an independent procedural review to ensure that decisions about Geological Time Scale remain credible and legitimate in the context of rapid planetary change.
The alarmist talking point insisting human CO2 emissions and “climate change” have been driving and will continue to drive the Earth’s 6th Mass Extinction event is not supported by the evidence.
The alarmist talking point insisting human CO2 emissions and “climate change” have been driving and will continue to drive the Earth’s 6th Mass Extinction event is not supported by the evidence.
Twenty years ago it was claimed climate change (global warming) would drive the extinction of one million species by 2050. This presumes human-induced rates of warming are so accelerated and unprecedentedly fast that species cannot adapt quickly enough.
It’s odd to believe ecosystems can withstand seasonal ±15°C temperature swings from summer to winter, or within a span of 6 months, but not the 0.005°C per year change since 1860.
A new study indicates the megafauna extinctions over the last 50,000 years – mammoths, giant sloths, giant armadillos, as well as the extinction of Arctic-dwelling horses, rhinos, bison, and camels – occurred primarily due to human occupation and predation in regions we had never been before.
“Hence, the global analyses strongly support human causation, and even indicate little or no interaction with climate change, neither in the severity of extinction and decline nor in the timing.”
Perhaps alarmist claims about mass extinction from climate change are, as they say, going the way of the dodo.
Author and Teacher Oliver Gough is a PhD candidate and playwright researching climate change theatre at the University of Queensland, where he also teaches.
The only way out is through: Embracing the existential weirdness of the era of climate change
Oliver Gough
…
Learning to die?
Roy Scranton is another writer who advocates for a deep and scary thought experiment to move past terminal inaction and sluggishness on climate change. He boldly suggests: “If we want to learn to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die.” The practice of coming to terms with an extinction of human beings and the existence of a planet without us can lead to a humbling, realistic and truly ecological way of thinking.
This extension of Morton’s “dark ecology” further does away with assumptions of human triumph over the elements, and accepts that: “Carbon-fuelled capitalism and its techno-utopian ideologues have promised infinite growth and infinite innovation, yet they have proven incapable of saving us from the disaster they have made.”
The answer? Imagining and learning the practice of death, preparing for it as you would a terminal diagnosis. This isn’t to lay down and welcome it, but to gain perspective and expand the range of responses. Economics and mathematics can’t quite imagine or express this experiment. Something like climate change, or the death of a species, is felt on levels beyond that realm.
…
Admittedly, ocean acidification, social upheaval, and species extinction are problems that humanities scholars, with their taste for fine-grained philological analysis, esoteric debates, and archival marginalia, might seem remarkably ill-suited to address … But the conceptual and existential problems that the Anthropocene poses are precisely those that have always been at the heart of humanistic inquiry: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live? What is truth? What is good? In the world of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality — What does my life mean in the face of death? — is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination.
Will students be cheered and encouraged if they decide to die early to avoid the rush?
I guess the takeaway is, if you want your kids to learn theatre and performance arts without also learning we all need to prepare for imminent death, probably best to choose somewhere other than the University of Queensland.
There is zero chance anthropogenic climate change in the foreseeable future will make the world uninhabitable for humans.
If a bunch of monkeys with brains the size of matchboxes could figure out how to survive in a much warmer world, I’m certain we could figure it out.
Oliver Gough is not alone in believing the world is about to end. A disturbing percentage of Aussie school kids believe they won’t survive to adulthood, because of climate change.
Oliver is free to embrace his whacky beliefs, but I am profoundly disturbed someone who holds such extreme views is a teacher at a major university. I am also concerned that my tax dollars are helping to give this guy a platform to express those extreme views to a larger audience, via a government funded news outlet.
Perhaps administrators or parents should take a closer look at exactly what children entrusted to the care of University of Queensland are being taught.
OECD’s Pisa program will measure the ability of students to take action in response to climate anxiety and ‘take their position and role in the global world’
h/t Dr. Willie Soon; “… take action in response to climate anxiety and ‘take their position and role in the global world’ …”
How to teach climate change so 15-year-olds can act
OECD’s Pisa program will measure the ability of students to take action in response to climate anxiety and ‘take their position and role in the global world’
“It’s going to get hot and everything’s going to be on fire and the oceans will rise,” says a year 11 student, Josh Dorian. “That’s just like the worst of the worst. How do you combat that?
“Well, you fix it, you stop it from happening, you take preventive measures,” says Josh, who is studying VCE environmental science at Mount Lilydale Mercy College, a high school in Melbourne’s outer east. “Involving kids in that is scary but I think it’s necessary.”
In 2025, for the first time in nearly a decade, science will be the major focus of the OECD’s program for international student assessment (Pisa) – which runs every three years (give or take Covid interruptions), its focus rotating between reading, maths and science.
This year it will measure the knowledge and ability of 15-year-old students from 92 countries and economies to act on climate change, under a new heading:Agency in the Anthropocene.
…
It’s about understanding their role in the ecosystem. “Not as a pinnacle up the top, but as a player in a whole range of other players in an ecosystem. They’re part of a system, which means they have to act responsibly in the system.”
The climate movement is dying, you can smell the desperation. The last two premier climate conferences have been hosted by oil sheiks and petro-tyrants who think fossil fuel is a “gift from god”. But even a dying snake can deliver a deadly strike. The climate movement is still doing a lot of damage on the way down.
When the climate movement is finally swept into the dustbin of history, this period during which our society taught millions of frightened children that it is their responsibility to save the world will rank high on the list of wicked acts committed by greens and their political enablers.
In 2001 the atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen, proposed that human activity was impacting natural environmental conditions to the extent that we had effectively left the natural stable conditions of the Holocene and moved into a new interval that he named the Anthropocene. In response to this suggestion, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was established in 2009 on the initiative of Phil Gibbard (PLG: the then chair of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy; SQS). The remit of the Working Group was to examine the evidence for human induced climate change as reflected in the recent geological record, and to determine whether this was sufficiently compelling for a new stratigraphic unit to be included in the Geological Time Scale (GTS) and, if so, at what rank. The Working Group, initially led by Jan Zalasiewicz (JAZ) and latterly by Colin Waters (CW), deliberated for 15 years before finally submitting a report to the SQS in late October 2023.
[…]
Following standard ICS procedure, it was expected that there would be 30 days allotted for the discussion of the AWG proposal, to be followed by 30 days for voting. Because of a possible conflict of interest, JAZ and MAH recused themselves from the administration of the voting process (although both participated in the discussion), and the discussion and ballot were conducted by the 1st vice-chair Professor Liping Zhou (Beijing University: LPZ) and Professor Adele Bertini (University of Firenze: AB), and who ensured that the process adhered strictly to the rules of ICS. However, when the discussion period ended and the Secretary moved to call a vote, both JAZ and MAH objected saying that the discussion period had been of insufficient length and that additional information on the Anthropocene proposal had been excluded. This did not find favour with a substantial number of SQS members who were anxious to move forward to the ballot. In order to meet the request for more time, however, LPZ and AB agreed to extend the discussion period, which was initially expected to end in late December, until the end of January. Voting finally began on 4th February, in spite of further objections from JAZ and MAH based on their view that adequate time was not allowed for discussion. It ended on 4th March at which point the results were declared.
The outcome was a decisive rejection of the Anthropocene proposal: 4 votes in favour; 12 votes against; and 3 abstentions. Three members did not vote, including JAZ and MAH, who then began a campaign questioning the legitimacy of the vote on procedural grounds and alleged contravention the ICS statutes. It is important to stress that there was no question of impropriety against either LPZ or AB, both of whom acted with complete integrity throughout a difficult process and who carried out their duties fully in accordance with the statutory requirements of ICS. Nor can the integrity of the SQS membership be called into question. All who participated in the process are geological scientists of the highest calibre, from a range of countries, and with wide expertise in Quaternary stratigraphy and chronology. It is clear from the comments that were made during the course of the discussion period, that many were unconvinced by the arguments in the AWG proposal, and their misgivings are clearly reflected in the decisive nature of the voting outcome.
The vote of the SQS has been recognized as valid by the ICS Executive, and that recognition has been near unanimously supported (15 yes, 1 abstention, 1 conflict of interest) by the chairs of the seventeen IUGS subcommissions, who are the ICS voting members. Although their proposal has been decisively rejected, the AWG has performed an important service to the scientific community by assembling a wide body of data on human impacts on global systems, and this database will be an essential source of reference well into the future. Moreover, the Anthropocene as a concept will continue to be widely used not only by Earth and environmental scientists, but also by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large. As such, it will remain an invaluable descriptor in human-environment interactions. But it will not be recognised as a formal geological term but will more usefully be employed informally in future discussions of the anthropogenic impacts on Earth’s climatic and environmental systems.
The PNAS paper cited In the I effing love science article features this graphic:
“Temporal changes in anthropogenic fingerprints per year per 100 records detected from global geological archives for the last 7,700 y. (A) Full-range record from 2050 BCE (not shown before 2500 BCE due to no fingerprints). (B) Enlarged record from 1750 to 2010 CE. The light blue line and dashed line denote the maximum values before 1750 CE and between 1750 and the 1930s. Temporal changes in anthropogenic fingerprints per year are shown in SI Appendix, Fig. S7. The original proxy records for detecting fingerprints are provided in Dataset S02 ” Kuwae et al., 2024
OK… Anthropocene: 1940-1980 RIP.
Next?
Reference
Kuwae M, Yokoyama Y, Tims S, Froehlich M, Fifield LK, Aze T, Tsugeki N, Doi H, Saito Y. Toward defining the Anthropocene onset using a rapid increase in anthropogenic fingerprints in global geological archives. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Oct 8;121(41):e2313098121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2313098121. Epub 2024 Sep 23. PMID: 39312679.
For now, we’re still in the Holocene.
Science has confirmed that a panel of two dozen geologists has voted down a proposal to end the Holocene—our current span of geologic time, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age—and inaugurate a new epoch, the Anthropocene. Starting in the 1950s, it would have marked a time when humanity’s influence on the planet became overwhelming. The vote, first reported by The New York Times, is a stunning—though not unexpected—rebuke for the proposal, which has been working its way through a formal approval process for more than a decade.
Guest “Roaches check in — but they don’t check out!” by David Middleton
Who could ever forget this classic 1980 TV commercial, featuring “the Greatest” Muhammad Ali?
As Kip Hansen very eloquently pointed out here and here, the Anthropocene is every bit as dead as all of the cockroaches ever killed by Muhammad Ali. However, just like roaches, the Anthropocene “checked in” to the geologic time scale, but won’t “check out,” despite being very, very dead.
These ten misconceptions underplay how much we have altered the global environment and undermine the new perspective we need to deal with a drastically changed world
Jan A. Zalasiewicz, Scott L. Wing and the Anthropocene Working Group
The concept of the Anthropocene epoch was born in February 2000 out of a moment of spontaneity. Chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen had been listening to a narrative emerging at an international convening of scientists in Mexico.
[…]
It’s absurdly simple. The shift from the Holocene to the Anthropocene epoch hits like a brick wall when looking at graphs that show changes in three major greenhouse gases and in global temperature during the last 30 millennia. All four of these critical planetary parameters shift from near-horizontal to near-vertical lines in the last 70 years or so.
[…]
By proposing a formal, geologically defined Anthropocene epoch, the working group intended to provide a precise definition for this recent, large, permanent and rapid transition in Earth’s physical, chemical and biological systems.
The proposal was rejected by the international hierarchy of stratigraphy—of which the International Commission on Stratigraphy is a part—without citing substantive reasons, but most public criticisms of the Anthropocene stem from a range of sources: from within the heart of geology, to well outside it, among the social sciences and humanities.
The proposal was rejected by the international hierarchy of stratigraphy… without citing substantive reasons…Smithsonian Magazine
The burden of proof was on the now defunct Anthropocene Working Group (AWG). They failed to make a coherent case for recognizing the Anthropocene as a formal geologic epoch. Zalasiewicz and Wing followed up their burden of proof fallacy with a string of strawmen and red herring fallacies, refuting alleged myths about the Anthropocene. Here’s an example:
4. Anthropocene strata are “minimal” or “negligible.”
That’s a very geological objection—but it’s wrong. Humans have, since the mid-20th century, been prodigious reshapers of the landscape and movers of rock and sediment (now, by more than an order of magnitude than natural sediment movers such as glaciers and rivers.) The amount of sediment settled behind the world’s thousands of big dams would cover all of California to a depth of five meters, and such sediments are full of distinctive markers, like pesticide residues, metals, microplastics and the fossils of invasive species. To define a time period formally, geologists must identify distinctive signals in sediments or rocks that can be correlated around the globe, and the presence of such markers is ubiquitous. The geology is real.Smithsonian Magazine
“The amount of sediment settled behind the world’s thousands of big dams would cover all of California to a depth of five meters”… Whether this is true or not, the fact is that such sediment is not concentrated in a five meter thick layer in California. It is scattered around the world behind “thousands of big dams.” What will happen to those dams and all those sediment accumulations over geologic time?
Without human intervention (maintenance), most earthen dams will have eroded away within 40 years. Large concrete dams, like Hoover dam, may last for 100’s or even 1,000’s of years, however…
Once those “thousands of big dams” have been removed by earth processes, all of that sediment would be transported downstream, eventually being deposited in natural sedimentary sequences. During the Late Pleistocene nature built lots of dams, impounding very large reservoirs, as the Late Pleistocene ice sheets retreated. Eventually these dams failed, leading to numerous megafloods. Glacial Lake Missoula is the most well-known example.
Normark and Reid (2003, p. 634) estimated a total volume of last-glacial flood deposits in the eastern Pacific Ocean as 1450 km3, including about 700 km3 from a single flood leaving the 57-m thick bed in the Escanaba Trough (but not including the deposits assessed by Gombiner et al., 2016). Assuming a 50% porosity for this sandy unit implies that the entrained sediment volume for this large early flood was about 15% of the maximum plausible total water volume of 2500 km3, the approximate maximum released volume of glacial Lake Missoula. Thus, this flood (and likely dozens of others) was exceptionally turbid.O’Connor et al., 2021
The Missoula megaflood was an outburst flood. Manmade dams are just future outburst floods.
Abstract
Outbursts from impounded water bodies produce large, hazardous, and geomorphically significant floods affecting the Earth as well as other planetary surfaces. Two broad classes of impoundments are: (1) valleys blocked by ice, landslides, constructed dams, and volcanic materials; and (2) closed basins such as tectonic depressions, calderas, meteor craters, and those rimmed by glaciers and moraines. In some environments, floods emanate from subglacial and subterranean sources. Outburst floods are geomorphically important over geologic time because large flows achieve exceptional shear stress and stream power values, thus forming some of the most spectacular landscapes in the solar system.O’Connor et al., 2022
The sediment deposits behind manmade dams will not remain intact after mankind is gone.
The only myth here is the notion of the Anthropocene as a formal epoch on the geologic time scale.
The Hockey Stick-O-Cene
The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was established in 2009. They appropriately chose a hockey stick for their logo.
Figure 1. The hockey stick says it all. The steam in the background is really funny. (AWG)
They spent the next 14 years waging a public relations campaign before finally putting a formal proposal together.
The Smithsonian article featured this image in support of an Anthropocene epoch:
Figure 2. “The stunning effect of humans on the atmosphere can be seen in the concentration of three important greenhouse gases: nitrous oxide, methane and carbon dioxide. These gases have increased far more in the last 70 years than in the previous 30,000 years or more. Global temperature has begun to spike as a result, and it will continue to rise as the full effect of higher greenhouse gas concentration is felt. Martin Head”
Can you say “Adjustocene”?
Their temperature graph not only erases the Medieval Warm Period… It also erases the Holocene Climatic Optimum, Neoglaciation and The Little Ice Age. It’s even worse than the Marcott-derived graph they employed back in 2016. Here is a far more realistic depiction of the average global temperature (PAGES 12K CPS) and CO2 (comparable resolution ice cores) over the past 12,000 years:
Figure 3. PAGES 12K CPS and Antarctic ice core CO2.
The CPS method best represents what we know about the evolution of the Holocene climate. The other four methods show very little temperature change from 9,500 years ago up until 1850 AD… A period when we know that there was massive ice retreat over the first 5,000 years and ice advance (Neoglaciation) over most of the next 4,500 years. CPS is the only one of the five methods consistent with the Holocene evolution of ice sheets and glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere.
Figure 4. CPS with historical climate periods and Neoglaciation (Grosjean et al., 2007), Early Holocene ice extent map (Dyke et al., 2003) and Alps tree line altitude (Bohleber et al., 2021).
While the CPS method still indicates significant warming over the past 150 years, it started at the coldest phase of the Holocene, a period when ice sheets were advancing… AKA The Little Ice Age:
Little Ice Age JUNE 5, 2015 / K. JAN OOSTHOEK
[…]
During the height of the Little Ice Age , it was in general about one degree Celsius colder than at present. The Baltic Sea froze over, as did most of the rivers in Europe. Winters were bitterly cold and prolonged, reducing the growing season by several weeks. These conditions led to widespread crop failure, famine, and in some regions population decline.
The prices of grain increased and wine became difficult to produce in many areas and commercial vineyards vanished in England. Fishing in northern Europe was also badly affected as cod migrated south to find warmer water. Storminess and flooding increased and in mountainous regions the treeline and snowline dropped. In addition glaciers advanced in the Alps and Northern Europe, overrunning towns and farms in the process.
Iceland was one of the hardest hit areas. Sea ice, which today is far to the north, came down around Iceland. In some years, it was difficult to bring a ship ashore anywhere along the coast. Grain became impossible to grow and even hay crops failed. Volcanic eruptions made life even harder. Iceland lost half of its population during the Little Ice Age.
Tax records in Scandinavia show many farms were destroyed by advancing ice of glaciers and by melt water streams. Travellers in Scotland reported permanent snow cover over the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland at an altitude of about 1200 metres. In the Alps, the glaciers advanced and threatened to bulldozed towns. Ice-dammed lakes burst periodically, destroying hundreds of buildings and killing many people. As late as 1930 the French Government commissioned a report to investigate the threat of the glaciers. They could not have foreseen that human induced global warming was to deal more effective with this problem than any committee ever could.Environmental History Resources
It’s bizarre that the AWG’s argument in favor of an Anthropocene epoch literally erased The Little Ice Age.
Geologic Time vs. The Keeling Curve
GEOLOGIC TIME
The Earth is very old — 4.5 billion years or more — according to recent estimates. This vast span of time, called geologic time by earth scientists, is difficult to comprehend in the familiar time units of months and years, or even centuries. How then do scientists reckon geologic time, and why do they believe the Earth is so old? A great part of the secret of the Earth’s age is locked up in its rocks, and our centuries-old search for the key led to the beginning and nourished the growth of geologic science.
The AWG claimed that the Anthropocene should be recognized as a distinct epoch, in part, due to the temperature and CO2 hockey sticks in Figure 2.
The AWG’s CO2 graph (red curve in Figure 2) is clearly the result of splicing instrumental data (Mauna Loa Observatory/Keeling Curve) onto ice core-derived estimates. This sort of exercise is guaranteed to gin up hockey sticks because the instrumental data are of much higher resolution than the ice cores. Over geologic time, neither the instrumental, nor ice core data will break out of the background noise.
Let’s look at temperature CO2 at an epoch-level resolution.
Figure 5a. Marine pCO2 (foram boron δ11B, alkenone δ13C), atmospheric CO2 from plant stomata (green and yellow diamonds with red outlines), Mauna Loa instrumental CO2 (thick red line) and Cenozoic temperature change from benthic foram δ18O (light gray line). P = Pliocene, Q = Quaternary (mostly Pleistocene)Figure 5b. Legend for Figure 5a.
The “Anthropocene” hockey stick blades will not be resolved over geologic time.
Managing Geologic Time
Key Phrases & Abbreviations
International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS)
International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS)
Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS)
Anthropocene Working Group (AWG)
Global Boundary Stratotype Sections and Points (GSSP’s, AKA “Golden Spikes”)
The Phanerozoic (visible life) Eon comprises the most recent 541 million years of geologic time. It is subdivided into three eras, from oldest to most recent: Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic. The Cenozoic Era began approximately 66 million years, after the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction. It is currently divided into three periods, from oldest to youngest: Paleogene (AKA Lower Tertiary), Neogene (AKA Upper Tertiary) and Quaternary. The most recent period has two epochs: Pleistocene and Holocene. The syllable “-cene” denotes a Cenozoic Era epoch. The only major difference between the Holocene epoch and the previous five Pleistocene interglacial episodes is the current “dominance” of human civilization on the planet. From a geologic time perspective, the Holocene already is the Anthropocene and it doesn’t even truly merit its recognition as a distinct epoch.
The process of managing the geologic time scale is essential for scientific communication. Changing the time scale requires >60% majority votes of the relevant subcommission and the International Commission on Stratigraphy and then has to be approved by the International Union of Geological Sciences Executive Committee…
The Anthropocene proposal was overwhelmingly voted down by the Subcomission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS).
The Anthropocene is dead. Long live the Anthropocene
Panel rejects a proposed geologic time division reflecting human influence, but the concept is here to stay
5 MAR 2024
For now, we’re still in the Holocene.
Science has confirmed that a panel of two dozen geologists has voted down a proposal to end the Holocene—our current span of geologic time, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age—and inaugurate a new epoch, the Anthropocene. Starting in the 1950s, it would have marked a time when humanity’s influence on the planet became overwhelming. The vote, first reported by The New York Times, is a stunning—though not unexpected—rebuke for the proposal, which has been working its way through a formal approval process for more than a decade.
“The decision is definitive,” says Philip Gibbard, a geologist at the University of Cambridge who is on the panel and serves as secretary-general of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the body that governs the geologic timescale. “There are no outstanding issues to be resolved. Case closed.”
[…]
Opponents also felt AWG made too many announcements to the press over the years while being slow to submit a proposal to the subcommission. “The Anthropocene epoch was pushed through the media from the beginning—a publicity drive,” says Stanley Finney, a stratigrapher at California State University Long Beach and head of the International Union of Geological Sciences, which would have had final approval of the proposal.
Finney also complains that from the start, AWG was determined to secure an “epoch” categorization, and ignored or countered proposals for a less formal Anthropocene designation. If they had only made their formal proposal sooner, they could have avoided much lost time, Finney adds. “It would have been rejected 10 years earlier if they had not avoided presenting it to the stratigraphic community for careful consideration.”
The Anthropocene backers will now have to wait for a decade before their proposal can be considered again. ICS has long instituted this mandatory cooling-off period, given how furious debates can turn, for example, over the boundary between the Pliocene and Pleistocene, and whether the Quaternary—our current geologic period, a category above epochs—should exist at all.
In order to approve an Anthropocene epoch at the subcomssion level, they needed at least 11 votes, they got 4. Despite losing by a 12-4 margin in the SQS, the AWG challenged the vote and the IUGS overwhelmingly upheld the rejection.
March 20, 2024
The Anthropocene
In 2001 the atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen, proposed that human activity was impacting natural environmental conditions to the extent that we had effectively left the natural stable conditions of the Holocene and moved into a new interval that he named the Anthropocene. In response to this suggestion, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was established in 2009 on the initiative of Phil Gibbard (PLG: the then chair of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy; SQS). The remit of the Working Group was to examine the evidence for human induced climate change as reflected in the recent geological record, and to determine whether this was sufficiently compelling for a new stratigraphic unit to be included in the Geological Time Scale (GTS) and, if so, at what rank. The Working Group, initially led by Jan Zalasiewicz (JAZ) and latterly by Colin Waters (CW), deliberated for 15 years before finally submitting a report to the SQS in late October 2023.
[…]
Following standard ICS procedure, it was expected that there would be 30 days allotted for the discussion of the AWG proposal, to be followed by 30 days for voting. Because of a possible conflict of interest, JAZ and MAH recused themselves from the administration of the voting process (although both participated in the discussion), and the discussion and ballot were conducted by the 1st vice-chair Professor Liping Zhou (Beijing University: LPZ) and Professor Adele Bertini (University of Firenze: AB), and who ensured that the process adhered strictly to the rules of ICS. However, when the discussion period ended and the Secretary moved to call a vote, both JAZ and MAH objected saying that the discussion period had been of insufficient length and that additional information on the Anthropocene proposal had been excluded. This did not find favour with a substantial number of SQS members who were anxious to move forward to the ballot. In order to meet the request for more time, however, LPZ and AB agreed to extend the discussion period, which was initially expected to end in late December, until the end of January. Voting finally began on 4th February, in spite of further objections from JAZ and MAH based on their view that adequate time was not allowed for discussion. It ended on 4th March at which point the results were declared.
The outcome was a decisive rejection of the Anthropocene proposal: 4 votes in favour; 12 votes against; and 3 abstentions. Three members did not vote, including JAZ and MAH, who then began a campaign questioning the legitimacy of the vote on procedural grounds and alleged contravention the ICS statutes. It is important to stress that there was no question of impropriety against either LPZ or AB, both of whom acted with complete integrity throughout a difficult process and who carried out their duties fully in accordance with the statutory requirements of ICS. Nor can the integrity of the SQS membership be called into question. All who participated in the process are geological scientists of the highest calibre, from a range of countries, and with wide expertise in Quaternary stratigraphy and chronology. It is clear from the comments that were made during the course of the discussion period, that many were unconvinced by the arguments in the AWG proposal, and their misgivings are clearly reflected in the decisive nature of the voting outcome.
The vote of the SQS has been recognized as valid by the ICS Executive, and that recognition has been near unanimously supported (15 yes, 1 abstention, 1 conflict of interest) by the chairs of the seventeen IUGS subcommissions, who are the ICS voting members. Although their proposal has been decisively rejected, the AWG has performed an important service to the scientific community by assembling a wide body of data on human impacts on global systems, and this database will be an essential source of reference well into the future. Moreover, the Anthropocene as a concept will continue to be widely used not only by Earth and environmental scientists, but also by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large. As such, it will remain an invaluable descriptor in human-environment interactions. But it will not be recognised as a formal geological term but will more usefully be employed informally in future discussions of the anthropogenic impacts on Earth’s climatic and environmental systems.
For an Anthropocene to ever be recognized as a formal unit of geologic time, it would have to be distinctly recognizable in the rock record long after mankind is gone. Apart from a few odd isotope ratios, there will be very little trace of our existence a few million years after we have gone extinct or left the planet. As George Carlin so eloquently put it…
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet… nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine… the people are f***ed! Difference! The planet is fine! Compared to the people, THE PLANET IS DOING GREAT: Been here four and a half billion years! Do you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years, we’ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus four and a half billion and we have the conceit to think that somehow, we’re a threat? That somehow, we’re going to put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us: been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?
Warning: Lots of F-Bombs!‘Habitus’ (2013 – ongoing) is an art installation by Robyn Woolston (robynwoolston.com), commissioned by Edge Hill University, which announces the Anthropocene epoch, Vegas-style. AAPG Explorer.
References
Bohleber, P., Schwikowski, M., Stocker-Waldhuber, M. et al. New glacier evidence for ice-free summits during the life of the Tyrolean Iceman. Sci Rep10, 20513 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-77518-9
Dyke, A.S., Moore, A. and L. Robertson. [computer file]. Deglaciation of North America. Geological Survey of Canada Open File 1547. Ottawa: Natural Resources Canada, 2003.
Finney, S. C., & Edwards, L. E. (2016). The “Anthropocene” epoch: Scientific decision or political statement? Geological Society of America Today, 26(2–3), 4–10. https://doi.org/10.1130/GSATG270A.1
Grosjean, Martin, Suter, Peter, Trachsel, Mathias & Wanner, Heinz. (2007). “Ice‐borne prehistoric finds in the Swiss Alps reflect Holocene glacier fluctuations”. Journal of Quaternary Science. 22. 203 – 207. 10.1002/jqs.1111.
Kaufman, D., McKay, N., Routson, C. et al. Holocene global mean surface temperature, a multi-method reconstruction approach. Sci Data7, 201 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-0530-7
O’Connor, Jim E., Victor R. Baker, Richard B. Waitt, Larry N. Smith, Charles M. Cannon, David L. George, Roger P. Denlinger, The Missoula and Bonneville floods—A review of ice-age megafloods in the Columbia River basin, Earth-Science Reviews, Volume 208, 2020, 103181, ISSN 0012-8252, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2020.103181.
O’Connor, Jim E., John J. Clague, Joseph S. Walder, Vernon Manville, Robin A. Beebee, 6.36 – Outburst Floods, Editor(s): John (Jack) F. Shroder, Treatise on Geomorphology (Second Edition), Academic Press, 2022, Pages 765-819, ISBN 9780128182352, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818234-5.00007-9.
MacFarling Meure, C., D. Etheridge, C. Trudinger, P. Steele, R. Langenfelds, T. van Ommen, A. Smith, and J. Elkins. 2006. “The Law Dome CO2, CH4 and N2O Ice Core Records Extended to 2000 years BP”. Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 33, No. 14, L14810 10.1029/2006GL026152. LINKData
Monnin, E., et al.. 2004. EPICA Dome C Ice Core High Resolution Holocene and Transition CO2 Data. IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology. Data Contribution Series # 2004-055. NOAA/NGDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA.
Pagani, Mark, Michael Arthur & Katherine Freeman. (1999). “Miocene evolution of atmospheric carbon dioxide”. Paleoceanography. 14. 273-292. 10.1029/1999PA900006.
Pearson, P. N. and Palmer, M. R.: Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the past 60 million years, Nature, 406, 695–699,https://doi.org/10.1038/35021000, 2000.
Royer, et al., 2001. Paleobotanical Evidence for Near Present-Day Levels of Atmospheric CO2 During Part of the Tertiary. Science 22 June 2001: 2310-2313. DOI:10.112
Steinthorsdottir, M., Vajda, V., Pole, M., and Holdgate, G., 2019, “Moderate levels of Eocene pCO2 indicated by Southern Hemisphere fossil plant stomata”: Geology, v. 47, p. 914–918, https://doi.org/10.1130/G46274.1
Tripati, A.K., C.D. Roberts, and R.A. Eagle. 2009. “Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability Over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years”. Science, Vol. 326, pp. 1394 1397, 4 December 2009. DOI: 10.1126/science.1178296
Zachos, J. C., Pagani, M., Sloan, L. C., Thomas, E. & Billups, K. “Trends, rhythms, and aberrations in global climate 65 Ma to present”. Science 292, 686–-693 (2001).
“…the committee’s parent body, the International Union of Geological Sciences, has decided the results will stand, the union’s executive committee said in a statement on Wednesday.
That means it’s official. Our planet, at least for the time being, is still in the Holocene epoch, which began 11,700 years ago with the most recent melting of the ice sheets.”
The reporting at that time included that the chair and the vice-chair of the commission both objected to the vote. “Even so, it was unclear Tuesday morning [March 5th] whether the results stood as a conclusive rejection or whether they might still be challenged or appealed. In an email to The Times, the committee’s chair, Jan A. Zalasiewicz, said there were “some procedural issues to consider” but declined to discuss them further. Dr. Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester, has expressed support for canonizing the Anthropocene.”
The highest governing body in geology has upheld a contested vote by scientists against adding the Anthropocene, or human age, to the official timeline of Earth’s history.
The vote, which a committee of around two dozen scholars held in February, brought an end to nearly 15 years of debate about whether to declare that our species had transformed the natural world so thoroughly since the 1950s as to have sent the planet into a new epoch of geologic time.”
Despite the continued objections of Dr. Zalasiewicz and his vice-chair, Martin J. Head:
“…the committee’s parent body, the International Union of Geological Sciences, has decided the results will stand, the union’s executive committee said in a statement on Wednesday.
That means it’s official. Our planet, at least for the time being, is still in the Holocene epoch, which began 11,700 years ago with the most recent melting of the ice sheets.”
# # # # #
Author’s Comment:
And, hopefully, that is the end of that! At least “officially”.
Activists and Advocates-of-all-stripes will continue to use the term to forward their anti-human stances and to blame all “bad things” on humans and human influences.
The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was established in 2009 to see if there was a way to geologically differentiate an Anthropocene Epoch from the Holocene Epoch.
The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was established in 2009 to see if there was a way to geologically differentiate an Anthropocene Epoch from the Holocene Epoch. The notion has always been preposterous because the only true difference between the Holocene and the preceding Pleistocene Epoch is the impact of humans on the planet. Otherwise, the Holocene has just been a run of the mill interglacial stage, geologically indistinct from the prior Pleistocene interglacial stages. After thirteen years, the AWG is finally prepared to present a recommendation for an official Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), also known as a “golden spike.” GSSP’s are stratigraphic markers that define the beginning and/or end of a geologic time period.
Scientists say they’ve found a site that marks a new chapter in Earth’s history
By Katie Hunt, CNN
Published 1:31 PM EDT, Tue July 11, 2023
CNN —
Scientists have identified the geological site that they say best reflects a proposed new epoch called the Anthropocene — a major step toward changing the official timeline of Earth’s history.
The term Anthropocene,first proposed in 2000 to reflect how profoundly human activity has altered the world, has become a commonly used academic buzzword uniting different fields of study.
“When it’s 8 billion people all having an impact on the planet, there’s bound to be a repercussion,” said Colin Waters, an honorary professor…
[…]
The AWG, a group currently comprised of 35 geologists, has been working since 2009 to make the Anthropocene part of Earth’s official timeline. The group determined in 2016 that the Anthropocene epoch began around 1950 — the start of the era of nuclear weapons tests, the geochemical traces of which can be found around the world.
[…]
Birthplace of the Anthropocene
For the Anthropocene, the proposed golden spike location is sediment cored from the bed of Crawford Lake that reveals the geochemical traces of nuclear bomb tests, specifically plutonium — a radioactive element widely detected across the world in coral reefs, ice cores and peat bogs.
[…]
The AWG will present a proposal to make the Anthropocene official to the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy later this summer. If the subcommission’s members agree with a 60% majority, the proposal will then pass on to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which will also have to vote and agree with a 60% majority for the proposal to move onward for ratification. Both bodies are part of the International Union of Geological Sciences, which represents more than 1 million geoscientists around the world.
A final decision is expected at the 37th International Geological Congress in Busan, South Korea, in August 2024.
The odds of the Anthropocene being ratified as a geologic epoch are slightly lower than…
Stan Finney, an actual professor of geology, and Secretary General of the International Union of Geological Sciences summed it up best…
He also feels that the push to officially recognize the Anthropocene may, in fact, be more political than driven by on-the-ground geology. The term was coined in 2000 not by a geologist but by the late atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen — apparently in off the cuff remarks at a conference.
Finney said it’s more accurate to describe humanity’s profound impact on Earth as an ongoing geological event rather than a formal epoch with a precise global start date. It’s also possible, he said, that stratigraphers may decide that the Anthropocene doesn’t rise to the level of epoch, but it could be the fourth age of the Holocene — the much less catchy Crawfordian Age.
Finney and Edwards outlined many of the misleading, if not outright false, statements that Anthropocene proponents have made in this GSA article, particularly noting the political nature of their advocacy.
Political Statement
When we explain the fundamental difference of the Anthropocene from the chronostratigraphic units established by the International Commission on Stratigraphy to proponents for its recognition, they often reply that the human impact on the Earth system must be officially recognized, if for no other reason than to make the public and governmental agencies aware of that impact. Or, as the editorial in Nature (2011) argued, official recognition would encourage cross-disciplinary science and a “mindset” to understand and to take control of the current transformation. However, it is political action that is required to meet the ultimate goals of ameliorating human impact, which raises the question of the ICS making a political statement. Pope Francis has spoken out about the human-induced impact on the Earth system—so too have leaders of many nations, the United Nations, and numerous non-governmental organizations. In California, Governor Jerry Brown has initiated and promoted many legislative actions with the goal of ameliorating human-induced impact. Is the role of the ICS to make such a political statement? Would official recognition of the term Anthropocene as a unit of the ICS Chart realistically have any effect on promoting cross-disciplinary science or recognizing that we are in the driver’s seat as Nature editorialized? Or, is that not already the case?
The evolution of vascular land plants and their spread across the continents from late in the Devonian to early in the Permian completely altered Earth’s surface, left a significant stratigraphic record, and dramatically altered CO2 and O2 concentrations in the atmosphere and oceans far greater than humans are projected to do (Berner and Canfield, 1989; Berner, 1998). Yet there is no drive to name a unit in the ICS Chart that formally recognizes that profound and irreversible change to the Earth system. Perhaps promotion of the Anthropocene is anthropocentric as well as political?
The “Atomic Age,” a term coined by The New York Times journalist William L. Lawrence in September 1946, has an identical boundary and content to the Anthropocene proposal of Zalasiewicz et al. (2015). By rights, the Atomic Age has nomenclatural priority. If the Anthropocene is not a political statement, those who value priority should prefer the Atomic Age.
The CNN article goes on to note that folks farther to the left than the AWG don’t like the term Anthropocene because only capitalism is to blame for everything bad that has ever happened in human history.
Others object to the term Anthropocene because it implicates all of humanity in the activity that has irrevocably altered the planet. Someresearcherssay the changes are the doing of a powerful and elite minority and that the epoch would be better named the Capitalocene.
If you want a fast track to a migraine headache, open up the Capitalocene link and try reading the gobbledygook.
These people a certifiably bat schist crazy…
Previous studies of the lake’s sediments revealed two major periods of change: one lasting from the thirteenth to fifteenth century, when Indigenous peoples speaking the Iroquois language lived in the area, and another beginning in the nineteenth century, marking the arrival of European colonists. The biggest number of changes appear in layers from the middle of the twentieth century, a period dubbed the great acceleration3 of human impacts.
Those layers document the rise of radioactive plutonium fallout from nuclear bomb testing; the working group chose that rise as the marker for the Anthropocene’s start. Cores taken at Crawford in 2019 and 2022 showed that plutonium traces increased in the early 1950s, but McCarthy and colleagues have collected an extra core this year to perform a more detailed analysis. Depending on their findings, the year proposed for the golden spike could be 1950 — when several environmental changes accelerated — or 1952, when plutonium levels rose sharply. “The difference is 2 millimetres, but philosophically it matters,” McCarthy says. If 1950 is chosen, the golden-spike core will be the one gathered in 2019, which resides at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. If 1952 is chosen, it will be this year’s core.
No more cores
McCarthy does not plan to collect cores at Crawford Lake again. The lake is sentient according to Indigenous groups who live or have lived in the area, and taking samples from the lake violates that personhood.
In the coming months, the working group will submit three ideas to the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy. First, Crawford Lake should serve as the golden spike for the Anthropocene’s start, with the year to be determined. Second, the Anthropocene should become a geological epoch ending the Holocene; the name of its first age could be the Crawfordian age. And finally, some of the eight sites that didn’t win the golden-spike designation could serve as supplementary sites to help define the Anthropocene across geological environments.
I don’t know which of the following is more laughable:
Debating whether or not a geologic time period started in 1950 or 1952.
An Epoch that’s only 6-8 years longer than I’ve been alive.
Having a “golden spike” that won’t be there in a few million years.
Declaring the “golden spike” off limits to future evaluation because it would violate the lake’s “personhood.”
Spending nearly 20% of a geologic time period, looking for evidence that it exists… This is like taking 3.2 million years to find evidence that the Miocene Epoch deserved to be differentiated from the preceding Oligocene Epoch. Geologic time refers to periods of hundreds of thousands to hundreds of million years, not hundreds of years… Much less seven decades.
Plutonium is not forever
The primary basis for starting the proposed Anthropocene Epoch around 1950 is the presence of plutonium in sediments, coral reefs and ice sheets.
Plutonium is a radioactive metallic element with the atomic number 94. It was discovered in 1940 by scientists studying how to split atoms to make atomic bombs. Plutonium is created in a reactor when uranium atoms absorb neutrons. Nearly all plutonium is man-made.
Plutonium predominantly emits alpha particles – a type of radiation that is easily stopped and has a short range. It also emits neutrons, beta particles and gamma rays. It is considered toxic, in part, because if it were to be inhaled it could deposit in the lungs and eventually cause damage.
There are five “common” isotopes of plutonium, Pu-238, Pu-239, Pu-240, Pu-241, and Pu-242. These are all “fissionable” – the atom’s nucleus can easily split apart if it is struck by a neutron.
The different isotopes have different “half-lives” – the time it takes to lose half of its radioactivity. Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years and Pu-241’s half-life is 14.4 years. Substances with shorter half-lives decay more quickly than those with longer half-lives, so they emit more energetic radioactivity.
Like any radioactive isotopes, plutonium isotopes transform when they decay. They might become different plutonium isotopes or different elements, such as uranium or neptunium. Many of these “daughter products” are themselves radioactive.
239Pu has a very long half-life of 24,100 years. If you start out with 1 gram of 239Pu, in just over 1 million years, you would have a sample that is 99.99999999998% composed of 235U. While naturally occurring uranium-235 is uncommon, it does exist. Over a geologically meaningful time-span, the anthropogenic “fingerprint” would no longer definitively be of anthropogenic origin, assuming the sediment core was lithified and preserved in the rock record. At best, the dawn of the Anthropocene would be represented by an anomalous uranium isotope ratio.
A likely compromise
While the IUGS is unlikely to ratify an Anthropocene Epoch, they do seem to be open to recognizing it as “geological event” rather than a formal geologic time period.
In contrast to the definition of a new Series/Epoch of the GTS, the designation of a geological event has no such formalization procedures nor GSSP requirements. Yet, to designate the Anthropocene as a geological event would not decrease its significance in Earth’s history. In fact, it would place the Anthropocene with other great transformations of the Earth system. Consider the example of the Great Oxidation Event, which occurred roughly 2.4-2.1 billion years ago and demonstrates that humans are not the first organisms to contribute to a global transformation of Earth (Sagan, 2020). Before the Great Oxidation Event, Earth had a weakly reducing atmosphere in which oxidation was prevented. After cyanobacteria began to produce oxygen as the waste product of photosynthesis, atmospheric oxygen levels rose and radically changed the course of planetary development, including the evolution of multicellular life and the colonization of land following the development of an ozone layer (Schirrmeister et al., 2013). Despite its firm basis in stratigraphy (Buick, 2008; Eriksson and Cheney, 1992), the Great Oxidation Event is not used as part of the GTS but is recognized as a major transformative phase of the Earth system. The same is true for the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE), and for the continental invasion by land plants that transformed the Earth system and stratigraphic records during the Devonian Period (Le Hir et al., 2011; Dahl and Arens, 2020). These examples emphasize that geologic events are not points in time: they are significant happenings or occurrences that are heterogeneous over time and across the Earth.
I discussed thieir paper in more detail in this 2021 post.
We already have an Anthropocene. It’s called the Holocene and really doesn’t deserve its status as an Epoch. Apart from the phrase “mass extinctions,” this is a fairly reasonable characterization of the human-related geological event.
The entire discussion is kind of pointless. Even if humans do leave definitive proof in the rock record that we significantly altered the “Earth system”… Proof that outlives us as a species and is preserved in the rock record, long after we’re gone… Who’s going to see it? Space aliens? Whatever lifeforms evolve to replace humans?
But, it’s always enjoyable to ridicule these folks…
There’s also a problem with using the word element, “-cene.” The current naming convention applies “-cene” to Cenozoic Era epochs. Instead of the Anthropocene Event, I would call it, the Anthropolitan Event… Better yet… The Fabulous Anthropolitan Event!
‘Habitus’ (2013 – ongoing) is an art installation by Robyn Woolston (robynwoolston.com), commissioned by Edge Hill University, which announces the Anthropocene epoch, Vegas-style. AAPG Explorer
References
Finney, Stanley C. & Lucy E. Edwards. “The “Anthropocene” epoch: Scientific decision or political statement?”GSA Today, 2016; 26 (3): 4 DOI: 10.1130/GSATG270A.1
Gibbard PL, Bauer AM, Edgeworth M, Ruddiman WF, Gill JL, Merritts DJ, Finney SC, Edwards LE, Walker MJC, Maslin M, Ellis EC. A practical solution: the Anthropocene is a geological event, not a formal epoch. Episodes 2022;45:349-357. https://doi.org/10.18814/epiiugs/2021/021029
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