Leicester, The Anthropocene became part of the zeitgeist after Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen launched the idea in 2000. This is the notion that a crescendo of human impacts has recently propelled the Earth out of the relatively stable climatic conditions of the Holocene epoch, during which human civilisation developed and flourished, to produce a new kind of planet.
We and our co-authors have just published two articles in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment that explore these questions from different angles. The evidence presented was not disputed. The official rejection was instead over whether a geological epoch – usually measured in millions of years – should be declared after just seven decades. Our second study looks beyond this question of formal geological status, charting the Anthropocene as an idea that is still spreading and making waves. In recent years, dedicated institutes and networks have sprung up in Stockholm, Jena, Vienna, Daejeon and Beijing. And their strength lies in bringing different disciplines together, where the social sciences and humanities are as – or more – important than the Earth sciences.
One details the evidence presented in our 2023 proposal to make the Anthropocene a new formal epoch: evidence then scrutinised in closed session by the geological bodies sitting in judgment, but only now published in peer-reviewed form. Over a hundred lines of evidence, from 12 exhaustively studied locations around the world, show that, geologically, the Anthropocene is rock solid. The Earth really did change, as an interconnected system, in the mid-20th century; and a level dated to 1952, when the first thermonuclear blast spread plutonium particles worldwide, marks an effective geological boundary for this new time interval.
These are all aspects of the so-called “great acceleration”: the rapid growth, since the mid-20th-century, of population, industrialisation and globalisation that transformed humanity’s impact on the Earth.
