The new era of humanity has not yet arrived: a committee of experts rejects entry into the Anthropocene

2024-03-05 14:11:47
Humanity has left an indisputable mark on the planet: it has changed the climate, it has polluted the air, it has made ecosystems disappear, it has acidified the oceans and it has exterminated species. For this reason, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry Paul Crutzen proposed in 2002 that we are immersed in a new geological period, the Anthropocene, marked by human activity. The term, unofficial but with notable scientific support and world famous, has been the subject of debate since then: Have we really brought about a new era? A committee made up of around twenty academics has said no. Experts have refused to declare the beginning of the Anthropocene, according to an internal announcement of the voting results released this Tuesday by ‘The New York Times’. Related News standard Yes The era of man, the Anthropocene, has already begun and the key is plutonium Javier Palomo A group of geologists points to Lake Crawford, in Canada, as the perfect starting point to begin studying this new stage Essays atomic Scientists divide the 4.6 billion years of Earth’s history into different geological periods. The International Union of Geological Sciences is responsible for deciding when each era begins and what defines it. Currently, we are in the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago with the retreat of the great glaciers. However, many researchers believe that the changes caused to the Earth by humans are so profound that we should inaugurate a new period, the Anthropocene. Recently, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) formed in 2009 by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) published a study that identified the place that best represents the beginning of this new stage: Lake Crawford, located in a nature reserve. a couple of kilometers from Toronto, Canada. In it, traces of plutonium have been found among the sediments at the bottom of the water. It is the trace of the nuclear weapons tests carried out by the United States in the Pacific Ocean in 1950. In this way, the Anthropocene would have begun in the mid-20th century, when nuclear bomb tests spread radioactive fallout all over the world. . But the committee assembled to debate this proposal has considered (by twelve votes against, four in favor and two abstentions) that this definition is too limited and recent to be a sign of an era modified by humanity. “It restricts, confines, reduces the entire importance of the Anthropocene,” Jan A. Piotrowski, a committee member and geologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, told The New York Times. «What was happening during the beginning of agriculture? How about the Industrial Revolution? How about the colonization of America, of Australia? », he asks. In short, they consider that the human impact goes further back in the history of the planet. Even on the Moon The beginning of the Anthropocene has been discussed practically since the appearance of the term, which comes from the Greek words ‘anthropos’, which means ‘human’, and ‘kainos’, which means ‘new’. It is not clear when it would have started. Some place it in the appearance of agriculture in the Neolithic, 10,000 years ago, while others believe that it was with the Industrial Revolution, at the end of the 18th century. For others, it probably began around the year 1610, with an unusual drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide and an irreversible movement of species between the Old and New Worlds. There are even those who speak of a lunar Anthropocene. Experts from the University of Kansas believe that the term should also be extended to our natural satellite, since it also bears the mark of human progress since the USSR Luna 2 unmanned spacecraft landed on the hitherto pristine lunar surface in 1959. . MORE INFORMATION news No Podcast Science | What if another star crosses the Solar System? news Yes Does Antarctica serve as a model for coexistence on the Moon? Erle C. Ellis, an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland, told the American newspaper that the rejection is a technical issue, which has “nothing to do with the evidence that people are changing the planet.” If one day researchers agree, accepting the Anthropocene would mean changing the terminology of research articles. textbooks and more teaching materials around the world. For now, those changes will have to wait. What is clear is that, whether it is called the Holocene or the Anthropocene, the human footprint on the planet is irrefutable.
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