Anthropoecne Epoch: The Man Age Has Begun

(NAZIA TAHIRA, WAHCANTT)

Earth's geologic epoch are basically time periods defined by evidence in rock layers and typically last more than three million years.

We're barely 11,500 years into the current epoch, the Holocene. But a new paper argues that we've already entered a new one: the Anthropocene, or "new man," epoch.

After 11,700 years, the Holocene epoch may be coming to an end, with a group of geologists, climate scientists and ecologists meeting in Berlin this week to decide whether humanity's impact on the planet has been big enough to deserve a new time period: the Anthropocene.

The term, coined in the 1980s by ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer, takes its prefix from the Ancient Greek word for human because its proponents believe the influence of humanity on the Earth's atmosphere and crust in the last few centuries is so significant as to constitute a new geological epoch.

The name isn't brand-new. Nobel Prize-winner Paul Crutzen, a co-author of the paper, coined it in 2002 to reflect the unprecedented changes humans have wrought in the roughly 200 years since the industrial revolution.

The report, however, is part of new push to formalize the Anthropocene epoch.

The Anthropocene Working Group assembles in Berlin on Friday, an interdisciplinary body of scientists and humanists working under the umbrella of the International Commission on Stratigraphy and "tasked with developing a proposal for the formal ratification of the Anthropocene as an official unit amending the Geological Time Scale".

The 30-strong group, which includes a lawyer, has outlined two key questions which it will address during deliberations at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt:
"How does the recent cognition of the immense quantitative shift in the biophysical conditions of the Earth affect both scientific research and a political response to these changes?" and "Does the Anthropocene also pose a profound qualitative shift, a paradigm shift for the ways in which science, politics, and law advance accordingly?

Many scientists are happy with the Holocene as a term, but after Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist popularised the "Anthropocene" at the turn of the millennium it refuses to go away and the ICS has deemed it in need of serious debate.

Recent human impacts, including habitat destruction, environmental pollution, and animal and plant extinctions have been so great that they'll result in an obvious boundary in Earth's rock layers, the scientists say.

"We are so adept at using energy and manipulating the environment that we are now a defining force in the geological process on the surface of the Earth," said co-author Jan Zalasiewicz, a paleobiologist with the University of Leicester in the U.K.

The key thing is thinking about how thousands or hundreds of thousands of years in the future geologists might come back and actually recognize in the sediment record the beginning of the Anthropocene," explained paleoclimatologist Alan Haywood of the University of Leeds in the U.K.

"It's not as straightforward as you might think, because the marker has to be very precise, and it has to be recognized in many different parts of the world," said Haywood, who wasn't involved in the new study.

One candidate for the marker is the distinctive radioactive signature left by atom bomb tests, which began in 1945. "The fallout is basically across the world," Haywood said.

In a similar way, scientists use traces of the element iridium left by meteor strikes to help define the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods: about 65.5 million years ago, the time of the great dinosaur extinctions (prehistoric time line).

Some scientists argue we haven't even entered the Holocene epoch never mind the Anthropocene.

The Holocene, they say, isn't an epoch at all, just another warm period within the Pleistocene, which began about 2.6 million years ago.

The group has given itself until 2016 to come up with a proposal to submit to the ISC, which ultimately determines what time period we live in - this might seem like a long way away, but when you consider the earliest epoch, the Paleozoic, began approximately 541 to 252 million years ago, it's just a speck in the Earth's history.
Whatever the final decision on the Anthropocene, it won't be a hasty one, said co-author Zalasiewicz. "The Geological Time Scale is held dear by geologists [because it is fundamental to their work]," he and his co-authors write, "and it is not amended lightly."

Any decision would then have to pass a series of review committees before going to the wider union for ratification. Zalasiewicz said there might be more urgency to formalize the Anthropocene these days, given that the term "is out there, is being used by working scientists, and is being used in the scientific literature."
But, he said, formalization probably won't occur for at least ten years.

NAZIA TAHIRA
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