Gaia Vince: humans have caused untold damage to the planet
We live in epoch-making times. Literally. The changes humans have made in recent decades have been on such a scale that they have altered our world beyond anything it has experienced in its 4.5bn-year history. Our planet is crossing a geological boundary and we humans are the change-makers.
Millions of years from now, a stripe in the accumulated layers of rock on Earth's surface will reveal our human fingerprint, just as we can see evidence of dinosaurs in rocks of the Jurassic, or the explosion of life that marks the Cambrian or the glacial retreat scars of the Holocene. Our influence will show up as a mass of species going extinct, changes in the chemistry of the oceans, the loss of forests and the growth of deserts, the retreat of glaciers and the sinking of islands. Geologists of the far future will note in the fossil records the extinctions of wild animals and the abundance of domesticates, the chemical fingerprint of materials such as aluminium drinks cans and plastic carrier bags, and the footprint of projects such as the Syncrude mine in the Athabasca oil sands of north-west Canada, which moves 30bn tonnes of earth each year - twice the amount of sediment that flows down all the rivers in the world in that time.
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