The Anthropocene is a proposed geologic chronological term for an epoch that begins when human activities have had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems.The term “Anthropocene” means the New Man Epoch. Since the idea was first proposed, there has been debate over when this human influence began.
An epoch is a subdivision of the geologic timescale that is longer than an age and shorter than a period. Officially we are currently living in the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period, within the Cenozoic age. The official arrival of the Anthropocene would mark the end of the Holocene. The Holocene was set based on a geochemical signal within Greenland’s ice cores. This marks the onset of warmer and wetter conditions that arose at the end of the last ice age, according to The New Yorker.
While the idea of a new epoch was first discussed during the 1960s (being Russian in origin), it took until 2008 for a formal proposal to be presented to the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London to make the Anthropocene a formal unit of geological epoch divisions. This was agreed, and from here on different scientific groups have been trying to work out from when this epoch begins.
According to a paper submitted to the journal Nature (“Defining the Anthropocene”) this point of origin should be set as the year 1610.
1610 has been selected based on the time when Antarctic ice cores show that there was a dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide, as the website io9 summarizes. It was around this time that the age of exploration was at its height, with the first Europeans reaching the Americas.
The date of 1610 is not universally accepted, according to the BBC. Other experts argue that the date should be set at the start of the industrial revolution or the first nuclear tests. If the “nuclear era” is selected the proposed year is not the detonation of the first test bombs, but a little later in 1964. This year is said to be discernible in rock layers by its high proportion of radioactive isotopes (a point of accumulation from significant levels of nuclear-weapons testing.)
A final decision on the start of the new human epoch is set to be made in 2016 when the International Commission on Stratigraphy next convenes.
