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Chr. Science Monitor: All hail, we’re in the Anthropocene. Maybe. |
| Published: February 7, 2008, 2:27 pm |
| Tags: science stories, environment stories |
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The Christian Science Monitor’s Robert C. Cowen, a member of the American Geophysical Union so he’s really interested in geological nomenclature, writes up a story that’s been kicking around but has not previously quite caught fire. Maybe we should not, despite what textbooks say, believe that we’re living in the Holocene. That’s the epoch that postdates the ice-age Pleistocene. Better yet, as Nobelist Paul Crutzen (of both Germany and the US) has pleaded for years, consider the Holocene as a flash in the pan that’s been cold toast for awhile. We’d be in the Anthropocene, dating back perhaps for centuries or even millenia. This recognizes that the industrial revolution has brought such change in species, landcover, climate, geochemistry, and other footprints that an unmistakable new boundary exists in the Earth’s strata. (Some would date it to the rise of agriculture). If we all go poof today, and on some distant day alien geologists [ Full article ] |
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