Since 2009, a secluded band of hard-rock geologists and other scientists have toiled on a mission of significant consequence. On Tuesday, they will deliver the last of their findings — the ground-zero location for the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch borne of humanity’s outsized impact on the planet.
If ratified, the Anthropocene would mark the first time in Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history that a single species has had a pronounced and lasting influence on its environment and natural processes. It would also signify a clear and abrupt rupture with the past, as humans have altered the planet’s morphology, chemistry, and biology.
But despite the term’s increasing popularity, establishing a new geological era is an enormous task. It requires finding a golden spike that stands apart from the rest of geologic time. This could be a lake deposit, coral reef, ice core, or a specific mountain range. The Working Group’s finalists are due to be unveiled on Tuesday at a press conference and the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) meeting. They must then face the gauntlet of skeptical, hard-nosed rock experts from the ICS’ Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy and the broader International Union of Geological Sciences.
The AWG’s task is to decide whether the Anthropocene deserves its own chapter in the international chronostratigraphic chart, a formal record of Earth’s planetary evolution that includes dates and events. Until recently, the evidence did not meet the technical criteria to warrant such a distinction. But around 2014, it started to pile up. Scientists have documented dramatic and widespread changes to the Earth’s ecosystems spanning all continents, from climate change and ocean plastic pollution to biodiversity loss and unprecedented erosion rates.
It is this evidence and not just the fact that humans have had a significant impact on every aspect of Earth’s life, which makes the Anthropocene worthy of recognition, says Zalasiewicz. The AWG members are also united in their commitment to cross-disciplinary collaboration. Many anthropologists, for instance, draw on methods developed in a field called multispecies ethnography, which focuses on how all humans and nonhumans are entangled across the globe.
Those same techniques can also be applied to other fields, such as geology. For example, a bog in southern Poland named Sniezka may seem like a natural landscape from a distance. Still, it records human interference from the 1950s to the present day, including fossil fuel combustion and industrialization, radioactive waste, and nuclear test debris.
Identifying such a “golden spike” will require more work from the AWG, focusing on sedimentary deposits and using geochemical markers. It will have to look beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries of geology and into the broader world of social science. This will require the members to transcend the rigid divisions between ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ and ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman,’ and to develop analytical tools for analyzing the complex entanglements that bind humanity to the Earth.
