Worry not about when the Anthropocene began, but how it might end

It is all too easy to imagine an era that is nasty, brutish and short


  • by
  • 07 13, 2023
  • in Leaders

It is by their beginnings that the ages of the Earth are known. Agreeing on the precise point at which each particular syllable of recorded time began is a fundamental, often fractious and frequently long-winded part of geological science. The Cretaceous period, for example, was first identified by Jean Baptiste Julien d’Omalius d’Halloy, a Belgian geologist, in 1822. But which rocks were the earliest to belong to it remains undecided. A working group of the International Subcommission on Cretaceous Stratigraphy recently spent a decade exploring the pros and cons of an outcrop in the French Alps. In the end the subcommission felt unable to accept its findings, and the group was disbanded. A reconstituted working group is now trying again. The depths of geological time teach patience.Nowadays, though, geological time has fast-flowing shallows. In 2000 Paul Crutzen, a Dutch Earth scientist, made a public plea that the role humankind now plays in shaping the Earth be made explicit; science should recognise the advent of the Anthropocene, “the recent age of man”.

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