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Crawford Lake in Ontario is the geological site that scientists have identified as embodying the proposed Anthropocene epoch, according to a July 2023 announcement.
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Scientists have voted against a proposal to declare a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene to reflect how profoundly human activities have changed the planet.
The proposal was rejected by members of the Subcommittee on Quaternary Stratigraphy, part of the International Union of Geological Sciences Three voting members of the subcommittee were contacted by CNN on Tuesday.
The vote followed a 15-year process to select a geological site that best reflects humanity's impact on the planet. That of the international union The Anthropocene Working Group, which led the effort, made an announcement in July 2023 which identified the site as Crawford Lake, Ontario, because sediments from the lake bottom reveal the geochemical traces of atomic bomb testing, particularly plutonium, in 1950.
The vote was not unanimous, said Kim Cohen, an assistant professor of geosciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and a voting member of the subcommittee.
“There were some abstainers. “There was a minority for yes and a majority for no,” said Cohen, who voted for the proposal.
Phil Gibbard, a professor Emeritus for Quaternary paleoenvironments at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and a voting member of the subcommission said that “the proposal for a formal Anthropocene was rejected by 66% of the vote.”
The geological time scale provides the official framework for our understanding of Earth's 4.5 billion year history. Geologists divide the history of our planet into eons, ages, periods, epochs and eras – with an eon being the largest period of time and an age being the shortest.
While only a few Scientists question the impact humans have had on the planet. However, the geological community was divided as to whether the changes reached epochal scale, suggesting that from a geological point of view it was too early for such an explanation.
Some experts argued that the beginning of the Anthropocene could be better defined in other ways, such as the beginning of the Industrial revolution. Others believe that human impact on the Earth is better classified as a geological event that occurs gradually over a long period of time.
Colin Waters, the AWG chairman who led the development of the proposal to make the Anthropocene an official part of Earth's geological history, said the result of the vote was “very disappointing.”
“We have, as a group, many outstanding researchers in their fields who wish to continue as a group in an informal capacity and will continue to argue that the evidence for the Anthropocene as an epoch should be formalized as consistent with the scientific data presented in the submission.” said Waters, honorary professor in the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment at the University of Leicester, via email.
“If the above vote is confirmed… then the current proposal cannot move forward, but given the existing evidence, which continues to mount, I would not be surprised if there was a call to reconsider a proposal in the future,” he said.
The proposal will not move forward at this time, said David Harper, professor emeritus of paleontology at Durham University and chair of the International Committee of Stratigraphy, which would have voted on the proposal if the subcommittee had adopted it.
The committee is too Part of the International Union of Geological Sciences, representing more than 1 million geoscientists around the world.
“This is the Commission's expert group for this geological period and we are bound by their decision. The current proposal will not be pursued further in accordance with our bylaws,” Harper said via email, adding that he had not been formally informed of the decision and would not comment further.
Cohen said there were several arguments both for and against the proposal that were raised during the subcommittee's six-week discussion period, but declined to provide further details. Regardless of whether the term is officially classified as a geological epoch, the Anthropocene is already widespread, Cohen noted.
“Everyone is already talking about it. Many people use it in magazines. But in geology there are not as many as in all other sciences,” he said.