A Lake Paves the Way for Defining the Anthropocene

https://eos.org/articles/a-lake-paves-the-way-for-defining-the-anthropocene

By Katherine Kornei, Eos/AGU.

Excerpt: Just as chemists have their periodic table, Earth scientists can lay claim to their own brightly colored reference diagram: the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, which divides our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history into meaningful chunks of time. Last month, researchers laid the groundwork for defining the current epoch of geologic time—a new line on that chart—that would cap the Holocene. They voted that Crawford Lake, a small body of water in southern Canada, serve as the reference site of the new proposed geologic epoch: the Anthropocene. ...deciding on one location that typifies humans’ influence on the planet was no small feat, said Waters. The proverbial fingerprints of our species—fallout from nuclear weapons testing, particulate matter from combustion, and nitrogen from fertilizer runoff, to name a few—are littered across the recent geologic record....

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