Guest geology by David Middleton
The fake geologic epoch known as the “Anthropocene” just won’t die… It’s like a zombie from a bad science fiction movie.
NEWS FEATURE 06 AUGUST 2019
Humans versus Earth: the quest to define the Anthropocene
Researchers are hunting for nuclear debris, mercury pollution and other fingerprints of humanity that could designate a new geological epoch.
Crawford Lake is so small it takes just 10 minutes to stroll all the way around its shore. But beneath its surface, this pond in southern Ontario in Canada hides something special that is attracting attention from scientists around the globe. They are in search of a distinctive marker buried deep in the mud — a signal designating the moment when humans achieved such power that they started irreversibly transforming the planet. The mud layers in this lake could be ground zero for the Anthropocene — a potential new epoch of geological time.This lake is unusually deep for its size so its waters never fully mix, which leaves its bottom undisturbed by burrowing worms or currents. Layers of sediment accumulate like tree rings, creating an archive reaching back nearly 1,000 years.
[…]
Given how much people have done to the planet, there are many potential markers. “Scientifically, in terms of evidence, we’re spoiled for choice, but we have to pin it down,” says Jan Zalasiewicz, a palaeobiologist at the University of Leicester, UK, and chair of the AWG.
[…]
Once they pick their representative marker, researchers working with the AWG need to gather enough evidence from around the world to convince the governing bodies of geoscience that they have found a truly reliable signal for the start of the Anthropocene. But some scientists argue that human activity has been shaping the planet for thousands of years, and that the working group has settled too quickly on the 1950s for the start of the proposed epoch. Erle Ellis, a geographer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and an AWG member, has criticized the committee’s plans for designating the start of the Anthropocene. “The AWG decided the timing of the boundary before deciding on the marker, not the other way around,” says Ellis.
Hard evidence
In the end, it will be the rocks that have the final say.[…]
After a decade of investigating this question, the AWG decided in May that humans had, in fact, left an indelible geological mark. In a binding vote in May, 29 of the 34 members opted to move forward with developing a proposal supporting the designation of the Anthropocene.
The AWG’s next task is to put forward a formal proposal identifying a global boundary stratotype section and point (GSSP), or ‘golden spike’…
[…]
In its recent vote, the AWG members decided overwhelmingly to pursue a GSSP in the mid-twentieth century.
[…]
A series of votes
Like the stratigraphic record that the researchers are studying, the decision to officially designate the Anthropocene is multilayered. The AWG aims to present a final proposal identifying a mid-twentieth-century GSSP to its parent body, the Quaternary Subcommission of the ICS, by 2021. If approved, the proposal will be voted on by the ICS and will then proceed to the executive committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) for final ratification. Only if it passes all these hurdles will the Anthropocene officially become a new unit of the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, more commonly known as the Geological Time Scale. So far, all 65 GSSPs that have been ratified are from marine environments, except for the one marking the start of the Holocene, which uses a Greenland ice core.The formal process has moved much more slowly than has popular culture, which has already embraced the Anthropocene and used the term on everything from record albums to magazine covers. But the AWG is clear that its mandate is to make decisions based on the stratigraphic record alone.
Not everyone is convinced it can do that yet. One sore point is that the working group made a decision on when to set the boundary, even though it had not yet settled on a golden spike in the stratigraphic record. “It is an imposition of ideas onto matter, shaping evidence to fit, but it should be the other way around,” says Matt Edgeworth, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester.
Edgeworth is a member of the AWG but voted against the decision to recognize the Anthropocene.
[…]
Nature
There’s no agenda here…
Despite being populated with activists like Naomi Oreskes, it has taken the AWG ten years to vote on what their conclusion will be and to start looking for evidence to support their conclusion… And the vote wasn’t unanimous.
Here’s where the Anthropocene dies…
The AWG aims to present a final proposal identifying a mid-twentieth-century GSSP to its parent body, the Quaternary Subcommission of the ICS, by 2021. If approved, the proposal will be voted on by the ICS and will then proceed to the executive committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) for final ratification. Only if it passes all these hurdles will the Anthropocene officially become a new unit of the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, more commonly known as the Geological Time Scale. So far, all 65 GSSPs that have been ratified are from marine environments, except for the one marking the start of the Holocene, which uses a Greenland ice core.
Nature
The geologic time scale is based on the stratigraphic record, generally found in “rocks”. The Holocene Epoch shouldn’t even be an epoch. It should be an interglacial stage within the Upper Pleistocene, rather than an epoch of equal stature to the Pleistocene. The Pleistocene-Holocene boundary, so clear in the NGRIP ice core, loses all of its uniqueness in Antarctic ice cores, which capture multiple Late Quaternary glacial-interglacial transitions.
Assuming the AWG is ever able to put forward a coherent proposal for an Anthropocene epoch starting in the mid-20th century, they face some high hurdles in getting it ratified.
In the end, it will be the rocks that have the final say.
Nature
There aren’t a lot of sedimentary rocks that are only 60-70 years old.
The recent subdivision of the Holocene was based on a formal recommendation from a Working Group and was approved by >60% votes of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy and the ICS Bureau, followed by ratification by the IUGS Executive Committee.
This leads us to the reason that the Anthropocene will almost certainly never be recognized as a formal geologic time period…
The utility of the Anthropocene requires careful consideration by its various potential users. Its concept is fundamentally different from the chronostratigraphic units that are established by ICS in that the documentation and study of the human impact on the Earth system are based more on direct human observation than on a stratigraphic record. The drive to officially recognize the Anthropocene may, in fact, be political rather than scientific.
Finney & Edwards, 2016
Dr. Stanley Finney is the Secretary General of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), which would have to ratify any formal changes to the geologic time scale. Dr. Finney’s term as the elected president of the IUGS runs through 2020… I wonder if it’s a coincidence that the AWG plans to present their formal recommendation in 2021?
References
Finney, Stanley C. & Lucy E. Edwards. “The “Anthropocene” epoch: Scientific decision or political statement?” GSA Today, 2016; 26 (3): 4 DOI: 10.1130/GSATG270A.1
Walker, M. , Johnsen, S. , Rasmussen, S. O., Popp, T. , Steffensen, J. , Gibbard, P. , Hoek, W. , Lowe, J. , Andrews, J. , Björck, S. , Cwynar, L. C., Hughen, K. , Kershaw, P. , Kromer, B. , Litt, T. , Lowe, D. J., Nakagawa, T. , Newnham, R. and Schwander, J. (2009), “Formal definition and dating of the GSSP (Global Stratotype Section and Point) for the base of the Holocene using the Greenland NGRIP ice core, and selected auxiliary records”. J. Quaternary Sci., 24: 3-17. doi:10.1002/jqs.1227
What’s more fake than an Anthropocene Epoch?
An Anthropocene Era.
The Anthropocene Era really would have been truly fabulous… for its brevity.
- Paleozoic Era: 541 to 252 million years ago, 289 million years.
- Mesozoic Era: 252 to 66 million years ago, 186 million years.
- Cenozoic Era: 66 million to 73 years ago, 65.999927 million years.
- Anthropocene Era: 1945-2018, 0.000073 million years.
I really couldn’t make this sort of schist up if I was trying.
From the article: “The drive to officially recognize the Anthropocene may, in fact, be political rather than scientific.”
There’s no *may* about it. It’s definitely political. They think if they can establish some kind of human fingerprint, or just make it look like they have, then that makes their case for human-caused Global Warming stronger. They want to be able to say: See how humans changed this, this, and this, and now they are changing the Earth’s atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. Humans are in control of Mother Nature’s atmosphere, is the message.
What was that I’ve been saying about hundreds of thousands of new science grads every year and the likelihood of all of them engaging in work that is actually of value?
If there is reason to consider an Anthropocene, the elephant in the room is the Global Great Greening! A new era of super trees and other flora, a 20% increase in forests and general “leafing out”, a massive increase in habitat, ocean edition in plankton explosion, all courtesy of mankind’s use of fossil fuels!!! Let’s go for it! Alarmists pretend it doesn’t even exist. Alarmist don’t credit doubling of harvests and spread of prosperity. When the cost/benefit is calculated, we we should be cutting cheques for the fossil fuel industry.
The only palpable sign of climate change thus far is this magnificent greening! If you want your anthropocene, this is it.
I don’t think the greening will leave a mark in the rocks.
A Greening may possibly leave a signature in anoxic lake sediments
Shotgun DNA sequencing provides information that allows old plant communities to be reconstructed.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2019.00189/full
And potentially what animals were present…
https://www.eva.mpg.de/documents/AAAS/Slon_Neandertal_Science_2017_2426338.pdf
Fossils?
Is old DNA a “fossil” ?
It wasn’t given much consideration in the 19th century
Plant, plankton, expanded numbers of critters could leave a sedimentary record.
We appear to be in the Hubrisocene era. We’re in charge. Riiiiight.
So they took a vote and thereby invented new “science”. Binding no less.
“After a decade of investigating this question, the AWG decided in May that humans had, in fact, left an indelible geological mark. In a binding vote in May, 29 of the 34 members opted to move forward with developing a proposal supporting the designation of the Anthropocene.”
Science is not voted on by a committee. It is determined by evidence and repeatable proof.
There’s one (1) geologic time scale. Changes to it have to follow a procedure. The procedure is established by the International Commission on Stratigraphy.
The science is done by a “working group.” They have to demonstrate that new geologic time period is justified to the relevant sub-commission, the ICS and the IUGS. The purpose is to standardize nomenclature.
http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/stratigraphic-guide/chronostratigraphy/
Before the establishment of the ICS, the geologic time scale was not standardized.
“though in practice no single GSSP is likely to be directly correlatable over the whole world”
The Chicxulub impact must come pretty close though. The fallout layer must be coeval within at most a few days all over the World. Admittedly it is not preserved in most places, but there are sites where it is preserved on every continent and in all oceans (I’m not sure about the Arctic Ocean though).
The “golden spike” marker for the onset of the Danian Age/Stage of the Paleocene Epoch of the Paleogene Period of the Cenozoic Era is the iridium layer at the El Kef site in Tunisia, blasted thence from the Yucatan.
You’d think that the Arctic Ocean would show traces, although the former Interior Seaway no longer ran all the way north from the Gulf of Mexico. The then much narrower and truncated seaway did however survive enough to force tsunami debris up the river valley which gave us the aptly-named Hell Creek Formation, Montana.
The Hell Creek formation spans much of the Maastrichtian and is by no means a tsunamite deposit. There is an apparent tsunamite at the recently described Tanis site, though it may have been caused by a seiche rather than a true tsunami.
And it is very likely that the K-Pg boundary layer occurs in the Arctic Ocean as well, but to my knowledge it has not yet been found there.
Well, I had my say on the Anthrop-Obscene long ago – you can find it here: https://insuspectterrane.com/2015/03/24/anthop-obscene/
Yep… If there is an Anthropocene, if shares a common GSSP with the Holocene.
Humans started affecting the fossil record even before the Holocene, during and indeed even before the Last Glacial Maximum.
We wiped out the Australian megafauna from ~52 Ka to 18 Ka, for instance. Then we did the same in Eurasia and the Americas partly before the Holocene as well as during it, and finally isolated oceanic islands more recently. Same for some microfauna.
A million years from now… will any of that be clearly resolved in the rocks? I tend to think it won’t be. The Holocene’s GSSP definitely won’t exist a million years from now.
Of course you’re right about the alleged Holocene GSSP.
But it’s entirely possible that paleontologists a million years from now might note the sudden disappearance of Pleistocene megafauna and other smaller fossil species in a brief c. 50,000 year interval around the world.
Rocks prserve fossils orders of magnitude older than Pleistocene remains.
Stages of the Pleistocene, Pliocene and Miocene are based upon first appearance or extinction of various marine algae and forams as GSSP markers, so why not the disappearance of large terrestrial mammal species?
Indeed, all the way back in the Cambrian, stages are marked by appearance or disappearance of trilobite and conodont species.
We need evidence that the “wiping out” was primarily caused by hmans and was not natural. Good references are? Geoff S
The Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene megafauna extinctions took place over 10’s of thousands of years at different times on different continents (Koch & Barnosky, 2006). Megafauna extinctions tended to occur shortly after significant human populations arrived.
The African megafauna extinction occurred about 1.4 million years ago when our ancestors learned how to hunt.
Australia’s megafauna extinction occurred about 40,000 years ago, shortly after large numbers of humans arrived. “Australia lost 14 of its 16 genera of Pleistocene mammalian megafauna along with all megafaunal reptiles” (Koch & Barnosky, 2006). By 40,000 years ago, Australia had already lost more than 90% its larger species (Prideaux et al., 2010).
Mammoths, Mastodons and Stegodons cruised through every Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycle right up until the one where humans and recently domesticated wolves began hunting them globally.
North American (Rancholabrean) extinctions appear to have occurred much later and possibly in at least two phases. While 16 of 35 Rancholabrean extinctions took place during the terminal Pleistocene (~2,000 yr period coincident with the Younger Dryas, the other 19 genera disappeared from the North American fossil record thousands of years earlier (Faith & Surovell, 2009). 2,000 years is a geological blink of the eye. Something catastrophic may have happened in North America during the terminal Pleistocene. This was also when the Folsom culture replaced the Clovis culture. A bolide is certainly a possibility for some of the Rancholabrean extinctions.
However, the overarching element is human predation and habitat encroachment.
It was probably a combination of factors. Deglaciation would have been very disruptive to habitats. We and our dogs were probably just the “straw that broke the camelops back.”
References
Faith, J. Tyler, Todd A. Surovell. “Synchronous extinction of North America’s Pleistocene mammals.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Dec 2009, 106 (49) 20641-20645; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0908153106
Koch, Paul L. and Anthony D. Barnosky. “Late Quaternary Extinctions: State of the Debate.” Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 2006. 37:215–50
Prideaux, Gavin J., Grant A. Gully, Aidan M. C. Couzens, Linda K. Ayliffe, Nathan R. Jankowski, Zenobia Jacobs, Richard G. Roberts, John C. Hellstrom, Michael K. Gagan, Lindsay M. Hatcher. “Timing and dynamics of Late Pleistocene mammal extinctions in southwestern Australia.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Dec 2010, 107 (51) 22157-22162; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1011073107
From the Nature article: “The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), a committee of 34 researchers formed by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) in 2009, is leading the work, with the aim of crafting a proposal to formally recognize the Anthropocene.”
When your job description is to “…recognize the Anthropocene.” then other alternatives are excluded by definition. So much for multiple working hypotheses.
They can do what they want. Geologic maps will still show Qal or Qac and not and Anthropocene crap. Just reinforces one of my longtime observations: Stratigraphers are strange people.
Qal and Qac don’t distinguish Holocene from Pleistocene. Even if they did convince the ICS that an Anthropocene Epoch was warranted, it’s not going to show up on geological maps, because it would still be Quaternary.
The SQS describes the purpose of the AWG a bit differently than the Nature article…
http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/working-groups/
Their mission was “to examine the possibility of recognising an Anthropocene division either within the Holocene or separated from it”… After 10 years, the best they could do is decide that the Anthropocene started in the mid-20th century and now they’re looking for this sort of evidence…
This is all they’ve come up with…
It’s basically a “participation trophy”…
http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/working-groups/anthropocene/
Most geologists aren’t fond of participation trophies.
Exactly, it would still be Quaternary.
That Nature can’t get the mission statement right says something about Nature.
The proposed fake geologic interval is an epoch rather than an era, but even epochs are much longer than a human lifespan.
As noted, the Holocene shouldn’t even qualify as an epoch, or even an age or stage.
Here are the durations of the valid Mesozoic and Cenozoic Era epochs, in approximate millions of years, as now recognized:
Early Triassic: 5
Middle Triasic: 10
Late Triassic: 36
Early Jurassic: 27
Middle Jurassic: 8
Late Jurassic: 20
Early Cretaceous: 46
Late Cretaceous: 34
Paleocene: 10
Eocene: 22
Oligocene: 11
Miocene: 18
Pliocene: 2.75
Pleistocene: 2.58 (plus 11,400 years of the bogus Holocene)
The Cretaceous Period really needs a Middle Epoch, expecially because the ages which would compose it were unusually warm, with high ocean transgression onto the continents.
Anthropocene advocates have suggested the appearance of man-made Pu-239 as marker of the anti-scientific, if PC, epoch’s onset. Too bad that an epoch even as brief as the Pleistocene as currently recognized would allow for more than 100 halvings of Pu-239, so that vanishingly little would remain at the end of such a bogus epoch. Its half-life is 24,100 years. Tiny amounts of the isotope have been discovered to occur naturally.
Yep… Their best bit of evidence, won’t be around long enough to be geologically relevant…
The rest of their “evidence” is a function of observing ongoing processes, unlikely to be recognizable in the rocks a few million years from now…
http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/working-groups/anthropocene/
Events in human evolution per Paleozoic period, then Mesozoic and Cenozoic epoch:
Cambrian: Phylum Chordata evolves, then vertebrates arise.
Ordovician: Jawed vertebrates develop.
Silurian: Bony fish diverge from cartilaginous fish (such as modern sharks, skates and rays)
Devonian: Bony fish split into ray-finned and lobe-finned (such as coelacanth, lungfish and tetrapod) lineages, and development of “amphibian” tetrapods from lobe-fins
Carboniferous Period: More terrestrial amniote anapsids and divergence of synapsids from diapsid reptiles.
Permian Period: Ever more mammal-like synapsids, eg Dimetrodon, leading to therapsids
Early Triassic: Clade Eucynodontia (mammals and most non-mammalian cynodont therapsids)
Middle Triasic: Clade Probainognathia
Late Triassic: Clade Mammaliaformes (descended from the most recent common ancestor of Order Morganucodonta and crown group mammals, ie monotremes, marsupials and placentals), Clade Theriiformes (mammals more closely related to therians than monotremes) and Infraclass Holotheria
Early Jurassic: Diversification in extinct and still living mammalian lineages, as Pangaea started breaking up
Middle Jurassic: Continued diversification
Late Jurassic: Subclass Theria (marsupial relative metatherians and placental ancestor eutherians)
Early Cretaceous: Clade Eutheria (possibly latest Jurassic)
Late Cretaceous: Cohort Placentalia, Clade Boreoeutheria (Superorder Laurasiatheria and euarchontaglires), Superorder Euarchontoglires (Glires, ie rodents and lagomorphs, and euarchontans) and Grandorder Euarchonta (Order Scandentia, eg tree shrews, and primatomorphs)
Paleocene: Mirorder Primatomorpha (Order Dermoptera, eg colugos, and primates), Order Primates (prosimian strepsirrhines, eg lemurs, and haplorines) and Suborder Haplorhini (tarsiers and simiformes, aka anthropoids)
Eocene: Infraorder Simiiformes (New World monkeys and catarrhines)
Oligocene: Clade Catarrhini (Old World monkeys and apes; possibly latest Eocene)
Miocene: Super family Hominoidea (apes), Family Hominidae (great apes), Subfamily Homininae (African great apes), Tribe Hominini (upright walking African great apes) and Genus Australopithecus
Pliocene: Genus Homo, species habilis
Pleistocene: Various species, eg erectus, and subspecies, to include sapiens sapiens late in the epoch
“than has popular culture, which has already embraced the Anthropocene”
Outside of left wing activists, I have never heard anyone use this term except as a point of derision.
When the bodies of humans start piling up in the strata we can call it the Néomarxistocene.
Might be detectable in the Ukraine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
This sums it up barely a second in a human’s life expectancy.
The Anthropocene if ever used to represent a geological period would only be considered a major event at best being the shortest duration definition like the LIA. (Little Ice Age)
An ‘Age’ being smaller than an ‘Epoch’ is still nearly a million years in duration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale