Drawing A Line In The Mud: Scientists Debate When 'Age Of Humans' Began

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https://www.npr.org/2021/03/17/974774461/drawing-a-line-in-the-mud-scientists-debate-when-age-of-humans-began

Source: By Rebecca Hersher, National Public Radio. 

Excerpt: Humans have changed the Earth in such profound ways that scientists say we have entered a new geological period: the Anthropocene Epoch. But when did the new epoch officially begin? ...Teams are studying 11 locations on five continents, looking for a place where rock, mud or ice perfectly capture the global impact of humans. ...ultimately only one site will be crowned the "golden spike" location for the Anthropocene: the place on Earth where a line in the rock, mud or ice exemplifies the unique markers of the age of humans. ...For example, there is a line of pollen and dust in a specific ice core from Antarctica that is the official reference point for the beginning of the Holocene epoch, which commenced when the last ice age ended about 12 thousand years ago. The golden spike location for the end of the age of dinosaurs about 66 million years ago is a line in a cliff in Tunisia, where global debris from a meteor impact is clearly visible. ..."There are some people who see an old Anthropocene that goes all the way back to when we see humans controlling and using fire, a hundred thousand years ago" ...Others point to the dawn of agriculture as the moment that humans began to have large-scale impacts on the planet. Still others...point to colonialism as the turning point. ...But the geologists on the Anthropocene Working Group disagree with the idea that the age of humans began hundreds or even thousands of years ago. They argue that industrialization and the nuclear age are the best geological markers of the new epoch. Specifically, scientists on the golden spike teams are zeroing in on a period in the 1940s and 1950s when some humans began detonating nuclear bombs....  See also The Difficulty of Defining the Anthropocene, [https://eos.org/articles/the-difficulty-of-defining-the-anthropocene] by Alka Tripathy-Lang, Eos/AGU, March 29.

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