The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age
Experts say humanity’s
impact on Earth now so profound that the Holocene must give way to epoch
defined by nuclear bomb tests, plastic pollution and domesticated chicken
Humanity’s impact on
the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene –
needs to be declared, according to an official expert group who presented the
recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town on Monday.
The new epoch should
begin about 1950, the experts said, and was likely to be defined by the
radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests,
although an array of other signals, including plastic pollution, soot from
power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation
of the domestic chicken were now under consideration.
The current epoch, the
Holocene, is the 12,000 years of stable climate since the last ice age during
which all human civilisation developed. But the striking acceleration since the
mid-20th century of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the global
mass extinction of species, and the transformation of land by deforestation and
development mark the end of that slice of geological time, the experts argue.
The Earth is so profoundly changed that the Holocene must give way to the
Anthropocene.
“The significance of
the Anthropocene is that it sets a different trajectory for the Earth system,
of which we of course are part,” said Prof Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the
University of Leicester and chair of the Working
Group on the Anthropocene (WGA), which started work in 2009.
“If our recommendation
is accepted, the Anthropocene will have started just a little before I was
born,” he said. “We have lived most of our lives in something called the
Anthropocene and are just realising the scale and permanence of the change.”
Prof Colin Waters,
principal geologist at the British Geological Survey and WGA secretary, said:
“Being able to pinpoint an interval of time is saying something about how we
have had an incredible impact on the environment of our planet. The concept of
the Anthropocene manages to pull all these ideas of environmental change
together.”.. read more:
