From the AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY
Determining when humans started impacting the planet on a large scale
Humans have so profoundly altered the Earth that, some scientists argue, our current geologic epoch requires a new name: the Anthropocene. But defining the precise start of the era is tricky. Would it begin with the spread of domesticated farm animals or the appearance of radioactive elements from nuclear bomb tests? Scientists report in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology a method to measure levels of human-made contaminants in sediments that could help pinpoint the Anthropocene’s onset.
The geologic record can sometimes provide clear-cut evidence of epoch changes. For example, when a meteorite collided with Earth 66 million years ago, levels of the metal iridium from the space rock spiked in sediments around the world. This clearly marked the end of the Cretaceous period. However, trying to define the start of the proposed — and much debated — Anthropocene could be more complicated. Human influence over the climate and environment began with the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, and accelerated dramatically in the second half of the 20th century. Many markers of human impact on the planet from agriculture, waste disposal and other activities have been archived in the planet’s sedimentary records. The rise in industrial chemicals, such as pesticides and pharmaceuticals, is another example of a human-driven activity that has been captured in sediment layers. To explore the record of synthetic compounds as a possible marker to help define the Anthropocene, Aurea C. Chiaia-Hernández, Juliane Hollender and colleagues turned to a new analytical technique combined with sophisticated data analysis to characterize patterns of contamination over time.
The researchers applied high-resolution mass spectrometry to investigate synthetic chemical contamination in two lakes in Central Europe. They examined 1-meter long cores from each lake bottom, capturing the past 100 years of sediment layers. According to the analysis, the lakes’ sediments contained few synthetic contaminants before the 1950s. But during the 1950s, concentrations of industrial chemicals started to appear in the samples, which is consistent with the boom in industrial activities post-World War II. The researchers say this record clearly demonstrates the beginning of large-scale human impact on the environment. It also shows a decline in contamination following the installation of wastewater treatment plants in the 1970s, providing evidence for successful mitigation measures. Additionally, the introduction of new pollutants that are now finding their way into surface waters can be discovered.
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The authors acknowledge funding from the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment, the Swiss National Science Foundation and Eawag.
The paper’s abstract is available here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.7b03357
One has to wonder if with all the pollution controls we have in place globally now, is there any sign of those chemicals that the authors claim signaled the start of the Anthropocene? Would the lack of those chemicals now signal the end of that epoch? It seems quite flimsy to me to base the beginning of entire epoch on a few lakes in Central Europe, especially since those chemical signals may be completely absent from the sediment layers forming now.
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“It seems quite flimsy to me to base the beginning of entire epoch on a few lakes in Central Europe, especially since those chemical signals may be completely absent from the sediment layers forming now.”
Toss in two bristlecone pines + truncate when the data turns Inconvenient™ = Bob’s your uncle.
Human influence on the climate either started with farming, or when man learned he could use fire to make hunting easier.
This is like determining when unicorns took over the earth; you FIRST have to prove that unicorns are real.
The endemic problem thst always occurs when human timescales meet geological ones.
It’s the hubris I take umbrage to. It’s unconscionable.
Spot on!
An explosion of hubris has buried all traces of truth and humility. Only Mann stands atop the dung pile, proud and demented!
It’s the Hubrisocene! Now we’re getting close!
impacting the planet on a large scale:
Has humanity altered the planets geo-magnetics?
8000 to 10000 years ago the australian natives cleared nearly the whole australian continent from its forests. Is this no human impact?
If the Anthropocene must have a start date, then it should be the CO2 ppmv of when it exceeded its normal range compared to other interglacials. Perhaps using 280 ppmv in the atmosphere as the start date would be appropriate if we are to have our very own ‘age’ so that would make it about 1850, when the Industrial Revolution was just starting to get established. The geological record is fairly accurate in that previous interglacials had CO2 concentrations of about 280-300 ppmv for highs in their normal interglacial CO2 level.
I recall Prof Ian Stewart on his BBC documentary show about geology and humans when he stated that it was because of human invention of agriculture that the next ice age was thwarted about 8,000-10,000 years ago. That seems to be a real stretch since Man’s agriculture practises at that point was minuscule at any scale during that pre-history period, and the present interglacial was just getting started with the Holocene Optimum and interglacial that would usually last at least 12 -15 thousand years. Since the HO, we have seen a gradual step down in temps with each new warming period, possibly indicating that we will slip into the next ice within a few thousand years. Hopefully, CO2 concentrations does supply a bit of warming, along with other convective heating by humans of every kind since a warming world is much more productive than a cooling world.
It is a fact that the CO2 curve in the Holocene has been very different from earlier interglacials. Normally it reaches an early peak and then declines. This time around it reached a minimum c. 6000 years ago and then started rising again.
The speculation that the Holocene would have ended but for agriculture has been thoroughly debunked. Few if any interglacials have been that brief.
OK, what have I missed …?
Mankind has made huge and profound changes to the climate but, in fact, they are so small that they cannot detect them. Have I got that right?
Mankind also invented politics.
So, you are wrong but politically correct.
This could be the ultimate naming-rights/appellation market ever: ‘The Anthropocene-Musk region abbuts the Anthropocene-Diddy region along the …’
Just don’t let the UN get wind of this idea.
There’s a reason I’ve always refused to join the ACS
Anthony,
You said, “One has to wonder if with all the pollution controls we have in place globally now, is there any sign of those chemicals that the authors claim signaled the start of the Anthropocene?” Probably most, if not all, of the original contaminants are gone. But, they have also probably been replaced with new and different pollutants as technology changes. I think that the key to making the argument for an “Anthropocene” (which I don’t support), is, are there synthetic compounds being released into the biosphere and lithosphere that characterize human technology? There seems to be good evidence that there are. But, is this movement a political one to use as some kind of leverage (such as “ocean acidification”), or is it of any use in geology for unraveling the history of Earth? I doubt that it is the latter.
In undergrad science back in the early 1980s we used to joke about the Anthropocene. Anytime we saw a bit of plastic or a tin can in the field, we’d say we found evidence of the Anthropocene.
It was a joke.
Were just kidding, I swear!
Let’s call it the ‘MakeTheScene’….. It started in 1966.
Mamas and Papas – Dancin In The Streets
https://youtu.be/_v2MwzdzFsY
Papa was a rollin’ creep!
Let’s see, Central Europe, 1950’s; industrial pollution, magic eight ball says the Ecological holocaust called Communism is a more likely than humanity in general. I’m just spitballing of course but the dataset seems pretty thin to make the conclusion of a worldwide anthropogenic event.
I think it was a Wednesday to be exact.
So are you saying that the possibility of Cumbra Vieja erupting in the next twelve months won’t figure into that scenario?
Latest news on it.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/871354/La-Palma-volcano-update-canary-islands-earthquake-Cumber-Vieja-dissolved-gas
This is just silly. The THEY can’t leave anything alone, can they? They’re like my sister, the control freak personified. Maybe we could just ignore them? Or would they pluck at our sleeves and whimper and whine, because we maybe think they’re downright silly?
At some point, this whole thing takes on the label of ‘the height of the ridiculous’.
It just dawned on me, if you were to take these researcher’s as correct, many people alive today were born in the previous geologic Age. You old farts are living fossils! How does it feel to transcend Ages?
And then there’s this [from 1994!]: “Ice pack reveals Romans’ air pollution”
“They detected surges in the amount of lead – a by-product of the process of extracting silver from lead ore – at depths corresponding to the rise of Athens and Rome. They also found lead pollution from medieval and Renaissance silver mines.
Finding lead in ice cores represents the oldest report of international atmospheric pollution, scientists say in today’s issue of the journal Science. ”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ice-pack-reveals-romans-air-pollution-1450572.html
So, cutting and burning down primeval forests didn’t affect global climate? Nor the spread of agriculture and grazing?
This is absurd.
Not to mention killing off the megafauna.
yeah we killed these off
http://www.lifegate.com/app/uploads/megafauna.jpg
sure 😉
Yup, we surely did, same as the fauna on Australia, New Zealand and remote islands.
How much of something on local environments affect global environment is the question. If a volcano erupts for a short period the affect is minimal globally and massively locally. How can such locally occurring situations cause global problems other than minutely? Only globally occurring situations cause global changes and only if they are massive enough to be measurable over time. Something these researchers implied was not measurable.
Johchi,
Deforestation isn’t a local effect like an urban heat island. It was continental. Much of Europe and China, for instance, used to be forested, as was the eastern US. The woodlands were cleared for large scale agriculture, not the shifting cultivation of the Neolithic.
Nope, cutting down forests affects local and pissibly regional climate not global.
Fail
Mark,
Deforestation on the scale of continents does indeed affect global climate. Turning Europe, Asia and North America, plus parts of the tropics, from forest to grassland or desert had much the same effect as did the natural replacement of boreal forest around the Pliocene Arctic Ocean to tundra in the Pleistocene.
Maybe the effect on water vapor, clouds, wind, etc wasn’t major, but it is detectable.
If human civilization ended today, in 600 million years there would be a very hard job to find a trace of us, the layer of strate would be so thin.
That is without geological events making it even harder, human civilization would be too small for the resolution to even pick up this period of 70 years lol
This is to be remembered when evaluating the veracity of proxy representations of past conditions. They apply to a specific locale on the planet at a specific time, and may be extremely skewed by unknown processes which occurred during the interval of time.
The expressions of certitude that the AGW’ers inflict on science are suspect at best. Mann’s proxies were cherry-picked B.S. that propped up a manifesto that was a complete joke scientifically. The fact that he hasn’t been drummed out of academia is a testament to the corruption of the entire field. They are just lying parasites, feeding off society’s fears and stoking them. Disgusting!
“Determining when humans started impacting the planet on a large scale”.
“Human influence over the climate and environment began” …..
Two different issues. Clearly every large city has impacted the local environment, and every increase in population changes the environment to provide more food and water. And that presumably has impacted local climates.
But impacting the planet? As oceans make up 71% of our planet, definition of the start of an Anthropocene would need to demonstrate a significant impact on the oceans and consequently on the global climate..
Over geologic time sea level has fluctuated by hundreds of meters. Today’s interglacial level is near historic highs and is 130 meters above the low level reached during the Last Glacial Maximum 19,000–20,000 years ago. That is an average increase of 6 mm/year, currently it is increasing by 2-3 mm/year. So I will define the start of the Anthropocene if sea levels start to increase by 10 mm/year giving a rise of 1 meter over the next 100 years that can be attributed to human impacts.
Detonate all of the nukes.
Then we’d have the “Anthropocene”.
We’d be living (well, some of us..maybe) in a Mad Max post-apocalyptic world where everybody is looking for fossil fuels or other carbon fuels to burn.
I live in Manassas, Virginia, home of Bull Run, the Manassas Battlefield, and surrounded by other Civil War landmarks. As a history buff, I’m constantly going after clickbait Internets collections of photographs from the Civil War. During one of these journeys into yesteryear, something suddenly struck me with shocking force. Having seen most of the locales pictured, I realized with stunning clarity one major difference between back then and now. Today, Virginia is densely forested – “green” is an understatement. But in the pictures from back then, it was completely devoid of foliage.
Exploring this further, I came to the realization that humans had pretty much deforested the entire mid-Atlantic region of the US for everything from construction lumber to wood for fuel, and for charcoal to fire the iron industry (before the discovery of the massive coal deposits in the region). All of that had been done by the middle 1800s, and the area didn’t begin to recover until the early 1900s (when farming shifted west, coal having long replaced charcoal). In my neighborhood, lots can’t be subdivided to less that 5 acres (to protect Civil War historical lands). The place is almost as heavily wooded now as it was before Europeans arrived in the New World, infinitely more so than it was 117 years ago, and wildlife is everywhere (we have two deer grazing in our front yard at this very moment).
An earlier commenter asked whether two World Wars didn’t count, and that’s another great observation. World War I’s devastation of nature in Europe was breathtaking. But the huge effect people had on the American continent prior to the availability of fossil fuels (coal, followed by oil and natural gas) was even more staggering. Yet the land has now returned to a state not seen in almost a century and a half. I don’t think we ever permanently entered the “anthropocene,” but if we try powering ourselves with wind and solar, it will definitely kill the planet.
Britain now imports US wood pellets rather than burning its own coal.
The Midwestern and Southeastern hard and softwood forests weren’t all burnt and cut down until about the time that the Atlantic Seaboard began to grow trees again, around the turn of the century.
The last confirmed wild passenger pigeon is thought to have been shot in 1901. The last of her species, Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.
Same for Europe over the last 1000 years or more. Had to find any virgin forested areas. Everything was cleared and burnt, especially before the age of coal and fossil fuels.
I am just watching a nature TV doc on SE Asia, Vietnam and the Mekong Delta as I write. It would be hard to know that the Vietnam war even happened now, having grown in completely by jungle. I think we underestimate the power of nature to heal itself. Having said that, we still need to take care of the planet, although with a tad of common sense.
This is not the name of a geological era, this is the name of a scientific paradigm shift. This moniker “Anthropocene Age” was appropriately given to the scientific paradigm in which the goal of science itself is to test thousands of useful chemical compounds for the sole purpose of convicting them of either being a carcinogen or of harming a delicate ecosystem.
The method for many decades was overdosing mice and rats in studies. It was assumed that effects on rats and mice were equivalent to the effects on humans.
After overdosing animals, it was then determined that the exposure of the contested chemical must be reduced to zero in the environment.
Many of these compounds are as natural as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane. Many are present in the human body or are produced by the human body.
This is the Hippyscene.
Another goal of science in the Anthropocene Age Scientific Paradigm is to constantly groom the public for green products that will save the planet. Is Bill Gates selling something like say, a new process for wastewater, by chance?