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Agence France-Presse

Since 2009, a cloistered band of hard-rock geologists and other scientists have toiled on a mission of great consequence.
On Tuesday they will deliver the last of their findings – the location of ground-zero for the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch borne of humanity’s outsized impact on the planet.
In essence, the Anthropocene Working Group was mandated by the high priests of Earth’s geological timeline to answer three questions.
The first, roughly, is this: would aliens sifting through Earth’s layered rocks and sediment a million years from now discern a human signature distinctive enough to mark a clear geological boundary?
If they did, when would it start?
Yes, the Working Group concluded, human appetites and activity have evicted the planet – and its inhabitants – from the stability of the Holocene epoch, which began 11,700 years ago as the last ice age ended.
Extinct-in-wild species in conservation limbo amid 6th mass extinction
The world is getting uncomfortably hot and its life-support systems are failing.
The threshold for the “epoch of humans” first proposed in 2002 by chemistry Nobel Paul Crutzen, they said, should be the mid-20th century.
This is when a sharp surge in greenhouse gas concentration, microplastic pollution, invasive species, radioactive traces from atomic bomb testing, and a dozen other markers of our species’ growing influence added up to what scientists now call the Great Acceleration.
That leaves the question of the “golden spike” – the single lake deposit, coral reef, ice core or other geological repository of evidence that best embodies the Anthropocene.
The “winner” will be announced Tuesday in joint press conferences at the Max Planck Society in Berlin and a meeting of working group scientists in Lille, France.
Presented as recommendations, the fruit of the Working Group’s long labours must now be validated by a gauntlet of sceptical, hard-nosed scientists at the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and, higher up the food chain, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS).


The chances of that happening are slim, according to almost everyone involved.
At one level, the issues under debate are narrow to the point of pedantry – rock experts quibbling over whether the Anthropocene merits inclusion in the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, the planet’s official 4.6-billion-year timeline.
Some geologists say it doesn’t meet the technical criteria, even as they acknowledge a rupture with the past.
At the same time, marking the end of the Holocene and the start of a new epoch would force us to ponder humanity’s devastating impact.
Why more people want a world without humans – it’s not all climate change
For the first time in Earth’s history, a single species has not only radically changed the planet’s morphology, chemistry and biology, but is aware of having done so.
Crutzen, who earned a Nobel for identifying the man-made chemicals destroying the protective ozone layer, hoped the concept and reality of the Anthropocene would focus minds on the challenges ahead.
“It could well be a paradigm shift in scientific thinking,” he said at a symposium in 2011.
A dozen years later, many of the scientists who look at how the strands of the Earth system intersect agree.

“It’s the recognition that, ‘Oh my God, we have tipping points. Oh my God, the Holocene is the only state that can support us’,” Johan Rockstrom, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said.
“The paradigm shift is the realisation that we’re leaving the Holocene and entering the Anthropocene.”
Other scientists, however, remain unconvinced, including powerful gatekeepers lobbying against the Anthropocene being adopted as a formal epoch.
“The conditions which brought about glaciation” – a dozen mini-ice ages over the last million years – “haven’t changed, so we might expect that the Holocene is simply another interglacial,” Phil Gibbard, Secretary of the ICS, told the “Geology Bites” podcast last year.
World’s first mass extinction was from a lack of oxygen: researchers
He suggested the planet could continue in that pattern for another 50 million years.
As for the Anthropocene, Gibbard has suggested calling it an “event” covering millennia of human alterations of the environment.
In geology, he noted, an event can be anything from a single raindrop pitting a lump of clay to the Great Oxidation Event that transformed Earth’s atmosphere some 2.2 billion years ago.
For Jan Zalasiewicz, a journeyman geologist who rose to the challenge of leading the Anthropocene Working Group through a forest of evidence and minefield of resistance for more than a decade, that’s not good enough.
Failure to formally ratify the concept, he said, would leave the impression that the Holocene conditions that allowed human civilisation to flourish are still there.
“Clearly they are not,” he said.
“I am concerned that if the word ‘Anthropocene’ continues to mean different things to different people, then it will lose its significance and simply fade away.”
In the end, Zalasiewicz said, we can only follow the evidence.
“Science is basically trying to establish what’s real as opposed to what’s not,” he said.
“And the Anthropocene is real.”


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Science

Scientists to reveal Anthropocene ‘golden spike’, defining the human era

For the first time in Earth’s history, a single species has radically changed the planet’s morphology, chemistry and biology. File photo: Nasa

The world is getting uncomfortably hot and its life-support systems are failing. Photo: AP

AI poses ‘extinction’ risk comparable to nuclear war, pandemics, say experts

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Photo: AFP

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testifies before a Senate Judiciary Privacy, Technology & the Law Subcommittee hearing titled “Oversight of A.I.: Rules for Artificial Intelligence” on Capitol Hill in Washington. Photo: Reuters

Extinct-in-wild species in conservation limbo amid Earth’s 6th mass extinction

Dinosaurs went extinct tens of millions of years ago; many creatures in the 21st century are also at risk of dying out. Photo: Xinhua


The European bison was reintroduced into the wild in 1952. File photo: SCMP

Why more people want human extinction: climate change, an AI ‘singularity’, and merging with a cosmic flow of data

Technology in human and machine concept as advanced tech or robots taking over humanity and people merging with a cyborg or computers idea with 3D render elements.&#xA;&#xA;CREDIT: Getty Images

Transhumanists believe that the only way forward for humanity is to create new forms of intelligent life that will no longer be Homo sapiens. But would the Earth be better off without humans? Photo: Getty Images

French philosopher Michel Foucault, pictured in 1979. Photo: Getty Images

A ranch hand sprays heifers with the pesticide DDT in 1947. Photo: Getty Images

American biologist and author Rachel Carson, pictured in 1951, helped inspire modern environmentalism with her warning about following “the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature”. Photo: Getty Images

Clive Owen and Clare-Hope Ashitey in “Children of Men”. Photo: Universal Studios

Extinction Rebellion campaigners stand on top of a train and one stands by the doors below during a coordinated protest at Canary Wharf Underground station, in London, England, on April 17, 2019. Photo; Getty Images

Cover of “The Uninhabitable Earth” (2019), by David Wallace-Wells, which describes climate change as “a threat of an entirely different category and scale”.

A diver picks up plastic waste from the ocean floor in the sea around Hatay province, in Turkey, as part of a United Nations awareness dive, on December 2, 2022. Photo: Getty Images

A blocked major intersection in the flooded Townsville suburb of Idalia, in Australia, on February 4, 2019. Photo: Getty Images

A giant piece of ice breaks off the Perito Moreno Glacier in Patagonia, Argentina, in June 2017. Photo: Getty Images

A dog in the ghost town of Pripyat, near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, on May 29, 2022. The town has been deserted since April 27, 1986, the day after the Chernobyl disaster. Photo: AFP

Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer, at the Riken Centre for Computational Science in Kobe, on June 16, 2020. Photo: AFP

The first mass extinction event was from a lack of oxygen, researchers say

A mass extinction occurs when at least 75 per cent of species are destroyed. File photo: Nasa

Climate change: possible human extinction a ‘dangerously underexplored topic’, scientists say

Eleven scientists from around the world call the  idea of human extinction and worldwide societal collapse ‘a dangerously underexplored topic’. Photo: Nasa

News

World

Scientists from the Anthropocene Working Group to announce the site selected to embody the Anthropocene epoch
The Anthropocene is a geological age that reflects humankind’s deep impact on the planet, following the Holocene epoch


Since 2009, a band of scientists have toiled on a mission of great consequence: to identify the proposed geological epoch borne of humanity’s impact on the planet.


Environment

Climate change

Food and agriculture