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More 60-Second Earth
The list of human impacts on the planet is a long one. We move more earth and stone than all the world's rivers. We are changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere largely by burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. And we now consume at least a quarter of all the sun's energy that plants have turned to food.
That's why geologists have come up with a new name for this new era in the planet's 4.5 billion year history: the Anthropocene, or the "age of man." Future rocks will record a shift from the preceding era, the Holocene, meaning "entirely recent." Our new era may be a scant 250 years old, dating to James Watt's steam engine. Or it could stretch back to the dawn of agriculture. Either way, it’s indisputable that it’s here, now.
Photosynthetic microbes filled the atmosphere with oxygen billions of years ago but they renovated the planet without awareness. We are thus the only life form that both created a geological era and became conscious of doing it. Hence our creation of events like Earth Day. In the hope that the Anthropocene doesn’t end too soon.
—David Biello
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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4 Comments
Add CommentThanks for reminding me that we can and should call this the beginning of the Anthropocene. There will be sedimentary layers that record our earth movements as well as "fossils" in the form of plastics. Layers of radioactivity will also help scientists to date the era. Open quarries rival the size of asteroid impact craters, and there will be evidence of our exploitation of the gas fields all over the earth and from under the seas. It also helps me to take the long LONG view of history, that this era may well play itself out on a timeline of hundreds of thousands of years (if it is a very short era) or possibly be something measured in millions of years. The short timeline still has enough time in it to reveal evolutionary changes in our species, perhaps adaptations to the environmental changes we are helping to bring about, and played out against millions of years the whole planet will have adapted to even the worst case scenarios of man made climate change. "Just" a million years from now our species will have evolved enough that a new species name or new species names will be needed. There is something gratifying in that, that in the end we will have been just one more species to come and go on this, our one and only planet. It would be nice to think that we will somehow avoid those worst case scenarios and will find sustainable lifestyles but even if we don't, Earth and its millions of life forms will go on for billions of years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a geologist I can confidently say that human impact on the geology of the Earth is almost zilch. It's not a mote on a dot on a...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, the bio influence is enormous but that's another issue.
I prefer to call it the beginning of the Monozoic Era since in a geologic eye blink we are likely to be the only species (or nearly so) on the planet due to overpopulation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe detailed study of the deposits of the anthropocene already has a name: "archeology".
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