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hatrack

(59,442 posts)
Mon Aug 22, 2016, 08:49 AM Aug 2016

Radioactivity, Plastics, Melting - Geologists To Define Marker For Official Start Of Anthropocene

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Later this month, an expert working group – set up to investigate whether these changes are so significant that the 11,500-year-old Holocene epoch is now at an end – will present its latest findings to the 35th International Geological Congress (IGC) in South Africa. They then plan to search for what is known as a “golden spike” – a physical point in the geological record that shows where one epoch changed to another – which could win over any remaining doubters among the geology community.

This would set in train a process that could see a formal declaration that we are living in the Anthropocene by the International Union of Geological Sciences in just two years. Dr Colin Waters, secretary of the Anthropocene Working Group who will address the IGC, told The Independent: “The key thing to us is the scale of the changes that have happened. “It’s of comparable scale with what happened with the Holocene and the transition from the last ice age.”

A key factor in defining the boundaries of the different chapters in Earth’s geological history has been climate as Earth moved from ice age to warm periods. In the past, humans had “no input into that and all the changes have been because of that natural oscillation”, said Dr Watson, a geologist at the British Geological Survey.

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The working group’s convener, Professor Jan Zalasiewicz, a palaeobiologist at Leicester University, said: “There’s a majority of opinion on the working group to say the Anthropocene is real.” However there is still a debate about when it started and some experts believe it is premature to formally declare a new epoch. “The feeling is that it would be better, most geologists would be more comfortable, if there was a ‘golden spike’ a physical reference point in the strata,” Professor Zalasiewicz said.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/anthropocene-epoch-holocene-planet-earth-geology-rocks-climate-change-global-warming-a7197491.html

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