Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Anthropocene.
This week, a group of 35 scientists at the International Geological Congress in Cape Town, South Africa officially declared a new geological epoch here on Earth called the Anthropocene Epoch. The term was unofficially coined in 2000 by atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate, Paul Crutzen, and it means anthropo, for “man,” and cene, for “new". The term marks a new era of human impact on the earth. Crutzen explained, “The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the late 18th century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane.”
It’s pretty bizarre and disturbing, when you consider how long humans have impacted this planet in the grand scheme of things. I mean, look at the effect our modern society is having on the planet, and you can’t even start to deny that this truly is a new era of life on earth. Whether it is flooding the waterways and oceans with plastic, killing off pollinators that supply our food, fracking for natural gas, blowing up mountains for coal to meet energy demand, clear cutting our forests at extremely alarming rates, industrializing agriculture and dramatically increasing our chemical and fertilizer use or even just excessive consumerism, we are dramatically changing the earth’s trajectory for future generations. Not to mention, these effects are irreversible.
All of this destruction adds to that pesky, inconvenient issue we're facing these days: global warming.
So now that the Holocene is over, scientists are looking for evidence to mark the start of a new era. They're looking for a "golden spike", which is explained in The Telegraph as, "A physical reference point that can be dated and taken as a representative starting point for the Anthropocene epoch." The research will take another two to three years.
Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester and chair of the group said, "We are spoiled for choice. There are so many signals." That’s for sure. Evidence of human impact is literally everywhere.
Just to put it into perspective for you, we don’t exactly declare a new epoch every day. The Holocene epoch began 11,700 years ago, the Quaternary period began 2.8 million years ago and the Cenozoic era started 66 million years ago with the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Here are some facts The Guardian compiled regarding humans' impact on the Earth as "evidence of the Anthropocene.”
– Humans have caused the extinction rates of animals and plants to rise to the point that the Earth is now on course to lose 75 percent of species within the next few centuries.
– We put so much plastic in our waterways and oceans that micro-plastic particles will be identifiable in fossil records.
– Within the past century, we have doubled the nitrogen and phosphorous in our soils by using our own fertilizer for agriculture. This is the largest impact on the nitrogen cycle in 2.5 billion years.
So, you’re probably wondering why this is breaking news, and why you should care that we have just entered a new era on planet Earth. Well honestly, to most people, it doesn’t mean a whole lot. We have just officially acknowledged the destructive impact we've had on the environment for quite a while now. It’s pretty insane when you step back and look at the effect our one species has had on this entire planet in such a short period of time.
