Are we in the ‘age of humans’? Not yet
It’s official, reports Vox: We are still living in the Holocene. For the past 15 years, a group of geologists has argued that humanity has so thoroughly transformed the natural world since the 1950s that our planet has entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, or human age. To make their case to the scientific bodies that serve as guardians of the world’s geological timescale, the researchers needed to find a “golden spike”—a physical site where the rock, sediment, or ice record clearly shows the shift from one epoch to the next. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) picked a deep sinkhole lake in Canada, where the sediment reveals a surge in everything from nuclear radiation to fossil fuel pollution to chemical fertilizer use in the mid–20th century. But a key committee of researchers last month voted that the Anthropocene should not become an official epoch, and the International Union of Geological Sciences—the final arbiter on the subject—has now upheld that decision. Objectors to the Anthropocene proposal noted that humans were changing the planet long before the 1950s, most notably through the agricultural and industrial revolutions, and pushed back against the introduction of a geological epoch that spans less than a human lifetime. The Holocene began 11,700 years ago at the close of the last Ice Age, and other epochs cover millions of years. Still, some scientists said they will use the term Anthropocene despite its lack of an official stamp. “We are in the Anthropocene, irrespective of a line on the timescale,” said Francine McCarthy, an earth scientist and member of the AWG. “And behaving accordingly is our only path forward.”