Are We in the 'Anthropocene,' the Human Age? Scientists Say: Nope

Science magazine "has confirmed that a panel of two dozen geologists has voted down a proposal to end the Holocene - our current span of geologic time, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age - and inaugurate a new epoch, the Anthropocene. "Starting in the 1950s, it would have marked a time when humanity's influence on the planet became overwhelming."The vote, first reported by The New York Times, is a stunning - though not unexpected - rebuke for the proposal, which has been working its way through a formal approval process for more than a decade... [S]ome felt the proposed marker of the epoch - some 10 centimeters of mud from Canada's Crawford Lake that captures the global surge in fossil fuel burning, fertilizer use, and atomic bomb fallout that began in the 1950s - isn't definitive enough. Others questioned whether it's even possible to affix one date to the start of humanity's broad planetary influence: Why not the rise of agriculture? Why not the vast changes that followed European encroachment on the New World? Stanley Finney, a stratigrapher at California State University Long Beach and head of the International Union of Geological Sciences, said "It would have been rejected 10 years earlier if they had not avoided presenting it to the stratigraphic community for careful consideration."Finney also complains that from the start, AWG was determined to secure an "epoch" categorization, and ignored or countered proposals for a less formal Anthropocene designation.... The Anthropocene backers will now have to wait for a decade before their proposal can be considered again... Even if it is not formally recognized by geologists, the Anthropocene is here to stay. It is used in art exhibits, journal titles, and endless books... And others have advanced the view that it can remain an informal geologic term, calling it the "Anthropocene event...." From the New York Times:Geoscientists don't deny our era stands out within that long history. Radionuclides from nuclear tests. Plastics and industrial ash. Concrete and metal pollutants. Rapid greenhouse warming. Sharply increased species extinctions. These and other products of modern civilization are leaving unmistakable remnants in the mineral record, particularly since the mid-20th century. Still, to qualify for its own entry on the geologic time scale, the Anthropocene would have to be defined in a very particular way, one that would meet the needs of geologists and not necessarily those of the anthropologists, artists and others who are already using the term. That's why several experts who have voiced skepticism about enshrining the Anthropocene emphasized that the vote against it shouldn't be read as a referendum among scientists on the broad state of the Earth. "This was a narrow, technical matter for geologists, for the most part," said one of those skeptics, Erle C. Ellis, an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "This has nothing to do with the evidence that people are changing the planet," Dr. Ellis said. "The evidence just keeps growing." Francine M.G. McCarthy, a micropaleontologist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, is the opposite of a skeptic: She helped lead some of the research to support ratifying the new epoch. "We are in the Anthropocene, irrespective of a line on the time scale," Dr. McCarthy said. "And behaving accordingly is our only path forward." Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.

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