AWG

• The entire process was controversial and the two us who are on the subcommission (chair Jan Zalasiewicz and vice-chair Martin Head) even refused to cast a vote as we did not want to legitimise it.
• In any case, the proposal ran into opposition from longstanding members.
• Many geologists, used to working with millions of years, find it hard to accept an epoch just seven decades long – that’s just one human lifetime.
• He and his colleagues were perfectly aware that humans had been doing that for millennia.

It makes no sense, Crutzen said, to use the Holocene for present time. He conceived the Anthropocene as the time when human impacts intensified, suddenly, dramatically, enough to push the Earth into a new state. The science journalist Andrew Revkin (who thought up the name “Anthrocene” even before Crutzen’s inspiration) aptly called it the “big zoom”.

Flesh on bones

• We’re part of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) that has been gathering evidence to put geological flesh on the bones of Crutzen’s concept.
• The AWG had a mandate: to assess the Anthropocene as a potential geological time unit during which “human modification of natural systems has become predominant”.

• It’s a nicely laid out, easy-to-understand picture that summarises the changes caused by human activity over the last million years.
• But what is lost here is any sense of the quantified rate and magnitude of change, other than by a little shading.
• The Y-axis is what scientists use to show the magnitude of measurements such as temperature and mass.

• They show that Crutzen’s Anthropocene is real, evidence based, and represents an epoch-scale change (at least).
• The repercussions cannot fail to last for many thousands of years – and some will change the Earth for ever.

Epoch vs event

• So the Anthropocene as an epoch is very different from the “event” of Erle Ellis and others, which encapsulates all human influence on the planet (and so is about a thousand times longer than the epoch, and differs in many other ways).
• ), it could perfectly well complement an Anthropocene epoch.
• That’s the Anthropocene as an epoch.

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• Colin Waters is Chair of the Anthropocene Working Group.
• Martin Head is part of the Anthropocene Working Group and the Quaternary Subcommission.

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