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Science

Are We in the 'Anthropocene,' the Human Age? Scientists Say: Nope (science.org) 63

Posted by EditorDavid from the ages-of-empires dept.
Science magazine "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... [S]ome felt the proposed marker of the epoch — some 10 centimeters of mud from Canada's Crawford Lake that captures the global surge in fossil fuel burning, fertilizer use, and atomic bomb fallout that began in the 1950s — isn't definitive enough. Others questioned whether it's even possible to affix one date to the start of humanity's broad planetary influence: Why not the rise of agriculture? Why not the vast changes that followed European encroachment on the New World?
Stanley Finney, a stratigrapher at California State University Long Beach and head of the International Union of Geological Sciences, said "It would have been rejected 10 years earlier if they had not avoided presenting it to the stratigraphic community for careful consideration." 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.... The Anthropocene backers will now have to wait for a decade before their proposal can be considered again...

Even if it is not formally recognized by geologists, the Anthropocene is here to stay. It is used in art exhibits, journal titles, and endless books... And others have advanced the view that it can remain an informal geologic term, calling it the "Anthropocene event...."
From the New York Times: Geoscientists don't deny our era stands out within that long history. Radionuclides from nuclear tests. Plastics and industrial ash. Concrete and metal pollutants. Rapid greenhouse warming. Sharply increased species extinctions. These and other products of modern civilization are leaving unmistakable remnants in the mineral record, particularly since the mid-20th century. Still, to qualify for its own entry on the geologic time scale, the Anthropocene would have to be defined in a very particular way, one that would meet the needs of geologists and not necessarily those of the anthropologists, artists and others who are already using the term.

That's why several experts who have voiced skepticism about enshrining the Anthropocene emphasized that the vote against it shouldn't be read as a referendum among scientists on the broad state of the Earth. "This was a narrow, technical matter for geologists, for the most part," said one of those skeptics, Erle C. Ellis, an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "This has nothing to do with the evidence that people are changing the planet," Dr. Ellis said. "The evidence just keeps growing."

Francine M.G. McCarthy, a micropaleontologist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, is the opposite of a skeptic: She helped lead some of the research to support ratifying the new epoch. "We are in the Anthropocene, irrespective of a line on the time scale," Dr. McCarthy said. "And behaving accordingly is our only path forward."
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.
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Are We in the 'Anthropocene,' the Human Age? Scientists Say: Nope More

Are We in the 'Anthropocene,' the Human Age? Scientists Say: Nope

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  • Let's acknowledge the 'Human Age' and start embracing our status as the planetary influencers that we are.
    • It's called geological epoch, I guess its their thing.

      • The Holocene Epoch is barely up to 0.01 million years, the next-shortest epoch is 200x longer, the average epoch is 1000x longer. If they end it now they might want to reclassify it to a sub-epoch or an age.

        The Holocene corresponds with the rapid proliferation, growth, and impacts of the human species worldwide, including all of its written history, technological revolutions, development of major civilizations, and overall significant transition towards urban living in the present.

        If only we had a name for a geologic period corresponding to humans.

        • The Holocene Epoch is barely up to 0.01 million years, the next-shortest epoch is 200x longer, the average epoch is 1000x longer.

          On the other hand, the geological consequences (temperature, atmospheric carbon isotope excursions, faunal turnovers) are going to be with us for order of 150kyr (0.15 Myr ; 15x as long as the Holocene-to-date), absent some major geoengineering for which nobody has demonstrated a workable mitigation solution. So, if the "Anthropocene" had been accepted, it would have had a durati

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbialac ( 320955 )
      Definitely not a bad idea, though I would more closely tie it to the beginning of the industrial age. The agricultural revolution was definitely a change and in my opinion is a start of a new age. It brought fort the beginning of civilization and great civilizations such as the Roman empire, China and India. But the industrial age put man in a place where we can change so much about the world. Since the 19th century, hunters can go out and hunt whatever large animal we desire. We can fish nearly anywhere. W

      • In terms of geological strata, I'll say that the anthropocene is marked by layers of the minerals portland cement and of asphalt (aka blacktop or macadam).

        These are metamorphic minerals, agglomerates that are distinctive to the anthropocene and found in no other geological strata.

        • These are metamorphic minerals,

          Agreed.

          agglomerates that are distinctive to the anthropocene and found in no other geological strata.

          But part of the problem with metamorphic minerals is that normal processes of, uhh metamorphism, tend to make it harder to recognise the original mineralogy of the progenitor rock. By the time those weird calcium aluminosilicate minerals formed by the reaction of Portland cement (a mixture, not a mineral), water and the CO2 in air have gone through another metamorphic cycle, w

    • As the geologist say, not long enough and not enough of an impact. If we manage to kill ourselves or some other global event kills us off, within a few hundred to a few thousand years nothing would be left. Some ruins like we find evidence of dinosaurs today but the majority of our stuff decays rather quickly. Within a few hundred years all the plastics we find today will be ground up and become fuel for something else, nuclear events of the past will become ever harder to detect. Perhaps you will be lucky

      • dinosaurs are still more important to our life today.

        Taking note of my decades-old signature below, Earth hosts around 6 or 7 thousand species of mammals, over 9 thousand species of dinosaurs, and I-don't-know how many species of tetrapod vertebrates ("fish", including mammals and dinosaurs).

        Remind me again of the 65 million year ago "extinction" of the dinosaurs?

  • we should call this era 'The Plasticene'.

  • Scientists love a good fight over terminology. (Score:4, Informative)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Sunday March 10, 2024 @02:57PM (#64304865) Homepage Journal

    If you ever handled databases with biology data, you'll be aware that organization of genuses and species are constantly getting reshuffled and occasionally unshuffled. It's not that anything has changed, or even that they disagree about the actual biology of the critters. They just fight over what to *call* things.

  • Hyperbolic statement doesn't make sense (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday March 10, 2024 @03:02PM (#64304875)

    "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..."

    I don't think one can reasonably claim this is both "stunning" and "not unexpected".

  • The End Times (Score:2, Insightful)

    by kittylu ( 705146 )
    Human activity is rendering the plant inhospitable for survival. And it isn’t even biblical, but basic physics and science. Extracting fossil fuels and spewing them into the air is resulting in massive climate change.

    • You are wrong. There is no evidence to support the assertion that climate change from fossil fuels is rendering the planet less hospitable. If you research the Paleocene Eocine Thermal Maximum, you will see that the opposite is true.

      • You are creating poverty for no good reason.

      • You're citing an event with an estimated atmospheric carbon increase of 1 PgC/yr as an analogy to the current anthropogenic carbon increase of 10 PgC/yr? Furthermore, an event that took place in an environment with no land ice cover? I suspect you'll have to correct your conclusions significantly as to what this means for us.

        • No. I do not. The polar deserts are becoming valuable real estate. I don't need to persuade anyone of anything. I need to secure property rights, build fences and buy guns to protect my claim from those who clued in late. I'm really just making conversation.

    • Not geologically. Our seas are hundreds of feet higher now than at the peak (nadir?) of the last ice age, a warming process that has been going on for over ten thousand years now. The earth adapts. Mankind adapts. The systems are dynamic and nonlinear. We are having an impact, but by no means are we "destroying the planet" or anything like that.

      • Not geologically. Our seas are hundreds of feet higher now than at the peak (nadir?) of the last ice age, a warming process that has been going on for over ten thousand years now. The earth adapts. Mankind adapts. The systems are dynamic and nonlinear. We are having an impact, but by no means are we "destroying the planet" or anything like that.

        "Destroying the planet" is a misnomer for anything short of a planet-killer smashing the actual planet to bits. What we're doing is influencing the biosphere we rely on in ways we're not quite smart enough to fully understand. There's a chance, not as great as the hyperbolic panic-monkeys want us to believe, not as negligible as the denialist-apes want us to believe, that we're influencing that biosphere in a way that may, eventually, lead to it being more and more uncomfortable for us to survive in, perhap

        • Can't disagree with any of this.

        • a planet-killer smashing the actual planet to bits

          Note : to achieve this, you'll need an impactor larger than Mars. Larger, indeed, than Mars, the Moon, Mercury, and the whole asteroid belt welded together into one. Just 1/10 Earth-mass (Mars-ish) wasn't enough last time.

          The Moon-forming impact was probably enough to sterilize the planet, but probably not to completely eradicate it's fossil record. Whether it eradicated it's previous geochemical record is an argued point.

          • a planet-killer smashing the actual planet to bits

            Note : to achieve this, you'll need an impactor larger than Mars. Larger, indeed, than Mars, the Moon, Mercury, and the whole asteroid belt welded together into one. Just 1/10 Earth-mass (Mars-ish) wasn't enough last time.

            The Moon-forming impact was probably enough to sterilize the planet, but probably not to completely eradicate it's fossil record. Whether it eradicated it's previous geochemical record is an argued point.

            To get technical, what we'd really need is either an impactor larger than Mars, or a projectile with much more speed than you would think natural phenomenon could lead to, though perhaps in an infinite universe given enough time could be achieved through a series of (un)fortunate fly-bys using planetary bodies as sling-shots to achieve faster speeds than normal free-fall into Sol's gravity-well would imply. Essentially, we'd need a MUCH more massive impact on the energy scale than the dino-killer. Whether t

            • A lot of the time, the modellers simply use the impact energy - which obviously includes both the impactor's mass and the closing velocity of the two bodies. Then, when they've got a range of plausible scenarios for whatever they're studying (Moon-forming ; Martian Hemispheric Dichotomy ; Venus-flipping ; Uranus-semi-flipping (I don't recall seeing any serious work on that one. Odd, that.) ... ), then they look into the impactor mass versus closing velocity to get appropriate energies and impact factors (be

  • They're wrong (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Sunday March 10, 2024 @04:36PM (#64305071)

    I expect they're trying to stay apolitical, but a global geological layer of radioactive isotopes and plastics along with what likely will one day be a major thinning of the fossil record is solidly apolitical empirical evidence.

    We as a species are having a significant effect on the planet's climate and chemistry, to the point you can take samples anywhere on the planet and find the evidence. We have altered the climate enough that it is triggering major shifts of ecosystems and causing mass extinctions.

    It is absolutely rational and meaningful to call the period during which this is happening a new geological epoch.

    • If you classify Neanderthals as humans, humanity will have been here for 0.8 million years. if you don't count Neanderthals, then you're looking at the last 300 thousand years as "The human age".
      Interestingly, if humans were to disappear tomorrow, of the 800-300 thousand years humanity spent on this planet, the only "meaningful" period that will leave long-lasting traces will be the last 200 years or so. Our actions might be called a geological epoch, yes, yet most of our existence is negligible. Compared t

      • >If you classify Neanderthals as humans, humanity will have been here for 0.8 million years. if you don't count Neanderthals, then you're looking at the last 300 thousand years as "The human age".

        The point is not to use our mere existence as a marker, but our effect on the planet. After all, it is major changes to the planet that mark the other divisions.

        If we disappeared tomorrow, the 'plutonium-239, micro-plastics, and drastic fossil drop' geological layer we have laid down globally would still mark a

        • Nope, it wouldnâ(TM)t. It would be a very hard to detect fraction of a millimeter layer.

          Humans are not the center of the universe, or even earth, regardless of what your fables tell you.

          • It would be a very hard to detect fraction of a millimeter layer.

            That's not how it would work. We'd look at fossils in samples from above and below the suspect layer, get date estimates for those, and try to narrow in on the particular boundary as closely as necessary or as possible. If your "index" fossils are 10s of mm wide (say, a nice typical bivalve shell), then locating a boundary to a fraction of a mm is, as you say, pointless.

            Which is why dating work is normally done with microfossils. Then the que

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by flink ( 18449 )

          You can have a geological "event", like a major eruption or meteor strike, that doesn't necessarily mark the end of an epoch. Like TFA says, the problem seems to be that they went too big going for a new epoch designation rather than something more modest.

          • Indeed. The Chicxulub impact event happened within the time interval that the large non-avian dinosaurs went extinct (and the important palaeontological changes took place within the oceans). Pending the recent drilling and coring campaign releasing it's full results, the Chicxulub event may have been coincident (to the best of our knowledge) with the palaeontological event. Or they may find fossils from before the palaeontological event above the impact event debris. Or they may find fossils from after the
      • Neanderthals are vastly less important for human influence on the planet than the Neolithic Revolution and the resulting population explosion though -- which is THE reason why many people have equated Holocene with Anthropocene for quite some time. I'm rather surprised by this submission because for me and many other people, Holocene and Anthropocene have been basically synonymous for many years for this reason alone.

  • Mistakes were made (Score:3)

    by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <gameboyrmh@@@gmail...com> on Sunday March 10, 2024 @04:40PM (#64305083) Journal

    Setting aside the issue that a couple hundred years is an insignificant blip in geological time, proposing the anthropocene as starting in the 1950s - after more than a century of industrial-scale fossil fuel use and after several nuclear bombs were set off, just for starters - was a massive mistake that probably helped to doom the concept, as detailed here:

    https://anthroecology.org/why-... [anthroecology.org]

    • We have the 'privilege' of being at the start of an epoch. You say 'a couple hundred years is an insignificant blip in geological time' and then argue that the dividing line chosen isn't at the right point within that time frame.

      In a thousand years nobody's going to care about the delay between the industrial revolution and the atomic age... the fact is that there is a geological layer you can point to, and it's not going to nail things down to a single year any more than any of the other layers we use to

      • In a thousand years nobody's going to care about the delay between the industrial revolution and the atomic age...

        You've never met a historian, have you?

  • ...then you'll piss off both geologists and astronomers.

    • Nah, then they'll just argue over whether or not the current age is a regular age or just a dwarf age. An argument that is already underway in threads above this one.
    • Disney just called. They want you to stop divulging plot points from the new Mickey Mouse movie.
  • When all the other evidence is from fossils, it's hard to imagine how the mess we've made in the last century or three will fossilize. But whoever digs it up will probably boggle.

    • Nobody will boggle, over those time periods everything averages out. Our current carbon in the air, averaged out over the last 1000 years means nothing, plastics degrade rather quickly (they are just carbon and burn very well), nuclear isotopes are already hard to detect today.

      • And the recently extinct species will become de-extinct and reappear in the fossil record. ...oh, wait, they won't!

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by guruevi ( 827432 )

          Neither will the dinosaurs come back. Most likely, like most species today and before that have gone extinct, there will be no fossil record at all. The fossil record make up a small percentage of all life that must have lived on earth. Tons and tons of things have evolved, lived and died without leaving any record.

  • I believe we are in the Anthrocalypse, but really Apocalypse is easier to say, and Apocalypso has a nicer ring to it

  • We are actually in the misanthropocene.

  • ...said, "we don't F-ing know yet"

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