No 'human era' in Earth's geological history, scientists say
A top panel of geologists has decided not to grant the 'human age' its own distinct place in Earth's geological timeline after disagreeing over when exactly our era might have begun.
A top panel of geologists has decided not to grant the 'human age' its own distinct place in Earth's geological timeline after disagreeing over when exactly our era might have begun.
Environment
Mar 22, 2024
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Since 2009, a cloistered band of hard-rock geologists and other scientists have toiled on a mission of great consequence.
Earth Sciences
Jul 10, 2023
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The human impact on Earth's chemistry and climate has cut short the 11,700-year-old geological epoch known as the Holocene and ushered in a new one, scientists said Monday.
Earth Sciences
Aug 29, 2016
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A team of researchers from several institutions in the U.K. and one in South Africa has come to the conclusion that the broiler chicken offers perhaps the most striking evidence of the rise of the Anthropocene. In their paper ...
The evidence for a new geological epoch which marks the impact of human activity on the Earth is now overwhelming according to a recent paper by an international group of geoscientists. The Anthropocene, which is argued to ...
Earth Sciences
Jan 7, 2016
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Geologists from the University of Leicester are among four scientists- including a Nobel prize-winner - who suggest that the Earth has entered a new age of geological time.
Environment
Mar 26, 2010
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A new study coordinated by CU Boulder makes clear the extraordinary speed and scale of increases in energy use, economic productivity and global population that have pushed the Earth towards a new geological epoch, known ...
Earth Sciences
Oct 16, 2020
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Godzilla first made his debut in 1954. At inception, he was a 50-meter tall metaphor for indiscriminate destruction, particularly U.S. hydrogen-bomb testing in the Marshall Islands, which, in the film, destroyed Godzilla's ...
Social Sciences
May 30, 2019
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Drawing together an array of interdisciplinary studies across archaeology, ecology, anthropology, and evolutionary theory, Erle Ellis, professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland Baltimore ...
Social Sciences
Dec 14, 2023
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(Phys.org)—A team of four scientists has published a Perspectives piece in the journal Science outlining their arguments for reaching back further in time than others have suggested for the beginning of the Anthropocene—a ...
The Anthropocene is a recent and informal geologic chronological term that serves to mark the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems. The term was coined by ecologist Eugene Stoermer but has been widely popularized by the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, who regards the influence of human behavior on the Earth's atmosphere in recent centuries as so significant as to constitute a new geological era for its lithosphere.
In 2008 a proposal was presented to the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London to make the Anthropocene a formal unit of geological time. A large majority of that Stratigraphy Commission decided the proposal had merit and should therefore be examined further. Steps are being taken by independent working groups of scientists from various geological societies to determine if the Anthropocene will be formally accepted into the Geological Time Scale.
Many scientists are now using the term and the Geological Society of America titled its 2011 annual meeting: Archean to Anthropocene: The past is the key to the future. The Anthropocene has no precise start date, but based on atmospheric evidence may be considered to start with the Industrial Revolution (late 18th century). Other scientists link it to earlier events, such as the rise of agriculture. Evidence of relative human impact such as the growing human influence on land use, ecosystems, biodiversity and species extinction is controversial, some scientists believe the human impact has significantly changed (or halted) the growth of biodiversity. The Anthropocene may have begun as early as 14,000 to 15,000 years before present, based on lithospheric evidence; this has led other scientists to suggest that "the onset of the Anthropocene should be extended back many thousand years":1; this would be closely synchronous with the current term, Holocene.
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