Geologists hoping to declare a new epoch dominated by humanity’s influence on Earth have chosen Crawford Lake in Canada as the location where the start of the Anthropocene is defined
At the International Congress of Stratigraphy in Lille, France, on 11 July, the group announced that Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada, is their chosenGet a dose of climate optimism delivered straight to your inbox every month.The layers of sediment at the bottom of the lake, which sits in a protected area and remains undisturbed by the outside world, record precise data about the time during which they were deposited.
“Crawford Lake has this annual chronology that has a very nice record of markers that we’ve suggested tie into the Great Acceleration,” says Turner. Sediment cores from the lake show a spike in plutonium-239, the radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing, dating back to the early 1950s that coincides with the surge in human activity at the time.
Other sites under consideration included Sihailongwan Lake in China and Beppu Bay in Japan. Ultimately, approval from the Indigenous community in the area and the protected status of the region clinched it for Crawford Lake, saysNot everyone is convinced that the Anthropocene needs to be defined as a geological epoch. “Humans have been impacting natural environments going back about 40,000 years,” saysat the University of Cambridge.
As part of the proposal, the AWG will need to nail down the exact year the Anthropocene started, which will probably be between 1950 and 1953, saysThe proposal must then be accepted in votes by three separate bodies before Crawford Lake can be declared the official location that records the start of the Anthropocene. The AWG hopes that a decision will be made in 2024.
“It is our hope that if the stratigraphic commission draws that line and formalises the time in Earth’s history when the planet has been so impacted by humans, it will hopefully convey a sense of urgency to people to act now to look after our planet,” says McCarthy.
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