In which epoch of the earth are we actually living and can people change the history of the earth, which takes millions of years? This is the question that a research group of geologists and other scientists has been working on since 2009. On Tuesday, the scientists, who believe that a new geological era called the Anthropocene has dawned, announced the best place on earth to prove this: at Crawford Lake, a small but very deep lake in eastern Canada.
The Anthropocene Working Group was set up in 2009 to answer three questions. First, would extraterrestrials examining rocks and sediments on Earth a million years from now find clear evidence of our activities today, and second, if so, when?
The working group has already answered these two questions. Human impact on nature ended the Holocene epoch, which began around 11,700 years ago. The planet is heating up above average and the life-saving relief systems such as primeval forests or the ecosystems in the world’s oceans are in danger of collapsing.
And according to the working group, the threshold for the Anthropocene, the earth epoch of humans, which the late Dutch chemistry Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen proposed in 2002, lies in the middle of the 20th century. From then on there has been a drastic increase in greenhouse gas emissions, microplastic pollution, invasive species and radioactive traces from atomic bomb tests. All of this combined led to what is known as the Great Acceleration.
According to the Anthropocene working group, this can best be seen in Crawford Lake in eastern Canada. It was chosen from twelve sites because its annual sedimentary layers are particularly distinguishable. The Max Planck Society in Berlin explained that it forms a stable geological archive.
The decision now has to be reviewed by independent researchers and approved by the International Union of Geological Sciences. However, there are doubts among experts that mankind has intervened so massively in the environment that it even ushered in a new geological era.
The Anthropocene Working Group, on the other hand, is convinced that for the first time in early history a single species has massively changed the earth itself – and with open eyes. Nobel laureate Crutzen hoped that a dramatic concept like the Anthropocene could make people realize the consequences of their actions. “It could mean a paradigm shift in scientific thinking,” he said in 2011.
A decade later, many scientists studying the interfaces of Earth systems agree with him. The head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Johan Rockström, speaks of the realization that there are turning points beyond which humanity can no longer go back, so-called tipping points, and that only the Holocene can preserve people. “The paradigm shift is the awareness that we are leaving the Holocene and entering the Anthropocene.”
Among the skeptics of the new concept is Phil Gibbard, Secretary General of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. “The conditions that lead to glacial formation haven’t changed, so we might expect the Holocene to be just an intermediate stage (between two mini-ice ages),” he said on the Geology Bites podcast last year. According to him, it could go on like this for another 50 million years and the Anthropocene is just an “event” in Earth’s history that lasts a few thousand years.
The British geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, who headed the Anthropocene working group from its inception in 2009 until 2020 and continues to belong to it, is not convinced. Without formal recognition of the term Anthropocene, the impression is given that the Holocene conditions that led to the flowering of humanity still existed. “They clearly don’t,” he told AFP. And he adds: “Science is determining what is real and what is not. And the Anthropocene is real.”
