Are We Entering a New Geological Age, the Anthropocene? (evolution, magnetic, cold)

[Woof]

Here's an interesting proposal to officially end the Holocene and start a new epoch, the Anthropocene. It's in the form of a chat box at Live Chat: Are We Entering a New Geological Age? - ScienceNOW but the chat has finished, and I don't know how long that link will work - so I'll post it here:

Are We Entering a New Geological Age?
(10/06/2011)
Thursday October 6, 2011
2:58
Gaia Vince: Welcome everyone, thanks for joining us. My name is Gaia Vince and I’m a writer for Science magazine, based in London, U.K. We’ve got a trans-Atlantic lineup for what's sure to be a really fascinating discussion today: joining me are Erle Ellis, a geographer of the University of Maryland in Baltimore County and Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester a few hundred miles north of me. So good afternoon and good evening to you, respectively.

Nearly a decade ago, Paul Crutzen (the Noble laureate who enlightened us about the link between CFC chemicals and the hole in the ozone layer) came up with the term 'Anthropocene'. "We're not living in the Holocene anymore," he said. "The world has changed too much." The idea has taken hold, and now geologists, ecologists and others are looking at the issue in detail, and asking: are we entering a new geological age?

So, I'd like to kick things off by asking you both, how are humans changing the entire planet?
3:01
Jan Zalasiewicz: We are producing a number of signals that will survive into the geological future and be preserved in strata. Among these are the new 'urban strata' that will be the fossilized remains of our towns and cities, a mass extinction event, an ocean acidification event and so on - the effects are multiple.
3:03
Erle Ellis: As a terrestrial ecologist, my focus is on ways in which humans have transformed the terrestrial biosphere. Looking at the long-term, we have eliminated top predators and herbivores from most ecosystems thousands of years ago, and continue to do so. This has led to a cascade of ecosystem changes in response. In the past few thousand years, the development of agriculture, involving the clearing of vegetation, soil tillage and introduction of domesticates- causing loss of habitat and extinctions. More recently, we have sped up the flow of species around the world- leading to a massive enrichment of ecosystems with exotic species. The impacts of agriculture on the biogeochemical cycles of nitrogen, carbon and phosphorus are equally powerful, but may not be as permanent.
3:05
Gaia Vince: So we're influencing the biota - the living parts of the planet - as well as creating and leaving new manmade structures.

3:07
Comment From Gosia
It's amazing... Will it influence our life? Why do you think it's a new geological age? Whose idea is it? The things change so very fast...
3:07
Jan Zalasiewicz: The Anthropocene will influence our lives, because the geological signals translate into environmental effects - thus a geological marine transgression (just beginning) is a sea level rise, for instance, that will drown low-lying areas (think New Orleans, for instance). The idea is more than a century old, but was restated about a decade ago by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer - and began to be used by many scientists after that. And you're right about the speed - these are geological effects happening with the speed and complexity of human history.
3:08
Comment From Bonny Lee Michaelson
Anthropocene fine, but it must start with whenever you want to start the beginning of man not the industrial age. The industrial age could be a subset as well as the prior agricultural age and the more current digital age. To decide that man's industrial age has that greatly changed the earth is still controversal, premature by hundreds if not thousands of years. Then maybe I am more like the Chinese when recently asked what they thought of the French Revolution..."To soon to tell!" It is not things happening faster but our judgements of them are happening faster.
3:09
Erle Ellis: I would have to agree with Bonny, that massive effects of humans on the planet go back into prehistory in many parts of the world. It is true that the Anthropocene has dawned slowly in human time. If we try to think geologically about this emergence though, the globally unambiguous symptoms of human activity are more recent, dating to recent centuries- the past rates of extinctions resemble those of earlier geologic periods- and agriculture, though old and clearly novel in Earth history, is not massive in extent and intensity until recent centuries. Recent centuries is the best answer I think.
3:13
Comment From Daniel Shepherd
We humans like to think that we have a much greater impact than we actually do, makes us feel important. I definitely believe we should take care of our planet, but the truth is that we haven't changed things much at all The temperature of the planet has barely moved since humans started messing things up. We have to face the reality that the earth was created far tougher and more resilient than we give it credit for.. =]
3:13
Erle Ellis: I would agree that our influence on climate has yet to become an unambiguous signal of global anthropogenic change- it is just starting to become large. Yet I think it will in the coming decades prove itself a clear and novel human alteration of the planet. The clearing of land for food production, domestications, and our facilitation of species invasions- I think these are already beyond anything in the geological record. To date, these are the big changes and they are suitably massive. Wait a bit for climate, and we shall see that become the big player (but hopefully, we will intervene first!)
3:14
Comment From Karl Petruso
I am interested in the way "entering" is defined. My understanding is that exactly when the earth "entered" the Pleistocene is still a matter of considerable scientific disagreement; the cooling of the earth was a very gradual process whose onset can be established in a number of plausible but mutually exclusive ways. Do we choose the first point at which a change in temperature can be isolated? Alternately, a tipping point? I predict that it will be a very long time--certainly well past our lifetimes--before there is any consensus on this topic, if ever. As they say: you can't measure a phenomenon when you are part of it. Or something like that.
3:15
Jan Zalasiewicz: That's a good point - and indeed geologists do discuss the boundaries between geological periods (at length!) - one simply needs to find the most appropriate and pragmatic level, and agreement eventually emerges (usually). For instance the beginning of the Pleistocene has recently been redefined to be at 2.6 million years ago, when the bipolar glaciation of the Earth started - and that has found substantial (if not total) consensus. The Anthropocene is complicated, because, as you say, something is beginning that will evolve for many thousands of years into the future. However, we have to work with it now (geology is a very pragmatic discipline), and so we must choose a boundary that would work for today's scientists. The two leading candidates are ca 1800 AD (about the beginning of the Industrial Revolution) and 1945 (the beginning of the nuclear age, that has left all later sediments measurably contaminated with radionuclides).
3:15
Comment From Kathleen
It seems that the Anthropocene overlays the Holocene. Human destruction of top predators was in large part the result of the top predators having trouble adapting to climate change at the end of the last glaciation. Human predators just pushed them over the edge.
3:15
Erle Ellis: I would tend to agree- it has been hard to prove that humans were the only cause in many of these extinctions. So even though these caused big changes- they are not the clearest signals of anthropogenic change.

3:18
Gaia Vince: We've been having quite a profound effect on our environment for thousands of years, it seems!
3:20
Comment From D. M. Chapman
How about Capitalism and Business minus morality and ethics? How will that affect the planet? If it affects education, will that not, in turn, have some negative effect on Ecology, Geology and history (the mark we leave on Earth)?

3:20
Erle Ellis: An excellent question and one we should all be thinking about. Now that the shape of the planet is up to us, our value systems leave a permanent planetary record. I have to agree wholeheartedly that we must consider the nature of our human systems- the values we teach, the cultures we live in and create, as the makings of our planet's future. I certainly hope that we can think more about this in the way we do things with our businessess, our education and our daily lives. In the Anthropocene, we can't separate our activities from our planet.
3:27
Gaia Vince: Chris Vernon asks:I guess the idea is if a geologist from the future, tens or even hundreds of millions of years into the future, long after Homo Sapiens have become extinct or evolved into something completely different, would they detect the species influence in the rocks? I'd say it is beyond doubt that over the last few hundred years our species has left an imprint in the geology that will remain for hundreds of millions of years. That's good enough for me declare it new geologic epoch - however it's likely to be an extremely short lived one, more like a boundary, depending on what comes next. Maybe the debate should be whether the anthropocene will turn out to be an age, epoch or period?
3:27
Jan Zalasiewicz:
Yes, there is likely already sufficient change to register in the future fossil record - perhaps not so much in terms of absolute extinctions (not yet at the level of the 'big five' mass extinctions of the geological past), but in terms of changes in species distributions produced by species invasions (we have reshuffled the Earth's species around the world already more than in any previous event in Earth history). Given another couple of centuries at current rates, though (especially with the effects of warming and acidification etc) a large extinction event is likely. The effects will not be a short 'blip', because evolution will then take place from the survivors, producing long-term (and effectively) permanent changes in the Earth's biota.
3:27
Gaia Vince: Although humans have been changing our planet for thousands of years - since the development of agriculture - would you say that our influence has become more extreme recently? Have we changed the scale of our planetary impact since the Industrial Revolution, say?
3:28
Erle Ellis: Will Steffen has referred to this as the "Great Acceleration" and has documented dramatic exponential increases in the rate, extent and scale of a very large number of Earth system processes (greenhouse gases and species invasions are just two among many), and a variety of human systems processes - population and consumption patterns. Even in agriculture- a truly ancient process, this is also evident. Recent intensification of agriculture- the amount of inputs, energy and effort have just exploded- with the result that we are now better fed than ever, but with a large number of ecosystem consequences, including water pollution, species extinctions and emissions of greenhouse gases.
3:35
Gaia Vince: Although we're making changes to the planet that are obvious to human observers now, on the timescale of a geologist, it might not be clear which of these changes, if any, will persist through the millennia. Many commenters are asking how geologists will decide whether the Anthropocene should be recognised and how they will make the decision.
3:35
Comment From Sophia
What supplementary evidences then the ones already available should be provided to have the Anthropocene officially declared as our new epoch by the International Commission on Stratigraphy?

3:35
Jan Zalasiewicz: There is a need for more evidence, not least because the Anthropocene is a relatively new concept (in its current guise) and also a very complicated one. Different human-made phenomena have spread through time and space across the planet, on land and in the sea - thus urbanization and industrialization has happened at differnt times in different places across the planet, and we need a better overall view to assess this phenomenon; basically, we need to map the spread of Anthropocene effects across the Earth - no easy task!
3:35
Comment From Julia Dottori
As far as I know, human population now grows exponentially, wich helps our planet to be leaded to an exponentially growing devastation. What do you think are the forecasts for the future of life here?
3:36
Erle Ellis: The forecast for population growth in this century is not exponential- growth rates have already slowed- it is the momentum of our huge populations that we are now seeing- not an acceleration of their rates of growth. But the concept of exponential growth has long trouble those concerned with human populations- Joel Cohen has written a great deal on this- and finds that human populations have a lot of options for resources- the standard Malthusian predictions rarely come true. That is not to say that more people do not cause big changes in the way the environment is managed- human population density does influence this- but not in the way we often think- denser populations tend to intensify their use of land for example- when demands are high, there is greater incentive to substitute technology and energy for use of land for example.
3:41
Comment From Guest
Surprised to have not yet seen a discussion on the role huge technological advancements play in ways humans are changing the
3:41
Erle Ellis: That is a most excellent point. Now that human systems have become the dominant player in the Earth system, our technological and social capabilities set the larger envelope for our population size and our living conditions- not the biophysical limits of the environment. It is notable that we humans often develop technologies that can change the world and our lives and livelihoods long before we actually need them and they scale up. There are many examples, starting in the Paleolithic I am sure- with sophisticated hunting techniques and use of fire developing early but only become the main way to do things when they become necessary to support people. The clearing of land for agriculture is similar- and so is the development of the new energy sources we need once we use up (or realize the negatives) of fossil fuels. The answers to our future problems are already here, but we have yet to need the answers.
3:42
Comment From Nitin Kumar Sharma
Dear Sir. If we go back to history, humans have evolved only during last 50,000 years or so. But if we compare this time with dinosaur era they are known to rule earth for over 150 million years. Our planet is known to exhibit magnetic field reversals every 300,000 years or so during which earth becomes extremely vulnerable to solar attacks. I have two questions; Firstly what do you think would be the effect of decaying magnetic field on humans, secondly if such solar attacks are potentially lethal which dinosaurs have sure enough survived hundreds of them isn't it too early to say that we are entering into a geological era of humans without being tested by such geological events?
3:43
Jan Zalasiewicz: It's quite true that magnetic reversals have happened frequently in Earth's history with several in the last few million years (though the Cretaceous, when dinosaurs lived, was a time of unusual magnetic stability, in fact). These reversals are good time markers for geologists (because they happened at the same time everywhere across the planet) - but they seem to have not been associated with any great biological upheavals or extinctions. So if another one takes place, it will play merry hell with our navigation systems and such, no doubt - but perhaps it will not be one of the greater dangers to threaten us.
3:47
Gaia Vince: Everyone's typing away - clattering keypads...

3:48
Comment From Chris Vernon
Could you comment on geoengineering? At some point we may be in a position to pro-actively shape the Earth system - would that be a unquestionable anthropocene?
3:48
Erle Ellis: Geoengineering is our middle name! There is nothing new about humans changing the Earth system to better suit our needs. Clearing forests and tilling soils have had large effects on a wide variety of Earth system processes, including climate- perhaps even thousands of years ago if Bill Ruddiman's Earth Anthropogenic Hypothesis is correct. That is not to say that we are so very good at this- our experience has been to make changes locally and in a fairly uncoordinated way- so that the global effects of our engineering tend to be unintentional. The Atmosphere/climate system is fairly fragile compared with the biosphere- more risky to modify I think. Another one coming up is the potential to avert extinctions by moving species North as the planet warms- the rates of that will certainly be unprecedented in the fossil record. We will almost certainly continue to increase the scale and scope of our planetary engineering- hopefully with care and good results. But if we need to move quickly to avert major climate problems, we may just have to roll the dice.
3:49
Comment From Chris
Supposing something happens in the next 100 years or so -- say a mass-extinction we cause which causes us to become extinct as well -- in geological time, will we really have had any great impact, or just be a momentary sedimentary blip in the soil record?
3:50
Jan Zalasiewicz: That's an interesting one. Some effects will be a blip - such as the changes to sedimentation on the land surface, and the distinctive 'urban strata' that we will leave behind. These will be vivid, but thin 'marker beds'. Other effects will linger. Thus, the carbon dioxide we have put into the atmosphere will take tens or hundreds of thousands of years to be reabsorbed into the Earth - and that is not counting any of the 'positive feedback' effects of initial warming, such as releasing methane from permafrost - the environmental reverberations (involving sea level change, temperature-driven species migrations) here will go on for longer. And changes to biology are 'permanent' in that they alter the course of evolution. There will be a long 'tail' of effects, even if we disappear tomorrow.
3:52
Comment From Jeff F
Our actions as both a society and a species have clearly altered the machinery of climate and ecology on Earth. Does evidence suggest the changes we've caused are reversible or does it predict a true and permanent alteration of the way our planet operates?
3:52
Erle Ellis: I think there is no way to put the genie back in the bottle: the major changes we are making are irreversible and permanent. We may remediate some of it over the long term- restoring habitats, reducing GHG emissions, maybe even by geoengineering of the atmosphere and the biosphere. But it will never be like it was before- in the Anthropocene we must embrace the planet our ancestors made for us and leave the best planet we can for those who come after us.
3:55
Comment From Michael Byrne
How does the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene differ from other transitions between epochs? Not so much in inciting incidents, but in terms of speed, destruction, growth and other factors/markers?
3:55
Jan Zalasiewicz: There are some very distinctive features to the Anthropocene. Some of its features are entirely new to the Earth (those urban strata and such). The rate of change is very fast - the CO2 rise thus is an order of magnitude faster than, say, that at the end of the Pleistocene epoch. Overall the effects will (looked at from the perspective of the far future, millions of years hence) will be seem akin to the effects of, say, a major meteorite strike.
3:57
Gaia Vince: We 7 billion humans are comparable to a fast-flung space rock - that's how the planet experiences it anyway.
3:57
Comment From Tim K.
Is it true that this new era is as simple as saying that wild systems are now integrated into anthropocentric systems? So now the earth is actually a human system that we control and change to our will?
3:57
Erle Ellis: In a word, yes. That does not mean that we have control over the "will" of human systems- in essence, we have created a system more powerful than our ability to manage it. Our challenge in the Anthropocene is to embrace our role in managing the planet and to start managing the human system, together with the biosphere, atmosphere, lithosphere and climate. "Wilderness" is now a land use no different from the decision to build a city- if we want nature, we have to either manage it to stay "wild" (it will be very hard to keep some places cool enough with all of the warming we are causing!), or make it ourselves by restoring or simply engineering the nature we want.
3:59
Comment From Peter Sayce
What do you think will be more prominent in the stratigraphic record; the wide range of animals going extinct or the relative increase in animals like cows or sheep which we have domesticated and introduced to many different places around the planet? Bearing in mind that cows produce so many gases that can be preserved in the rock record.

3:59
Erle Ellis: I think they will both be prominent and permanent. They will also be easy to differentiate- leaving different signals in the record.

4:01
Comment From Guest
What distinguishes the proposed Anthropocene from the existing Holocene? What becomes of the Holocene if Anthropocene is accepted?

4:01
Jan Zalasiewicz: If the Anthropocene is formally accepted as a unit of the Geological Time Scale (and there is a good deal of analysis and discussion still to do, for the Geological Time Scale is central to geology, and not amended lightly) then it depends on the type of unit which the Anthropocene will become. If it is regarded as an Epoch (of equal rank to the Holocene) then the Holocene must formally end (at 1800 AD, 1945 or whichever other boundary might be selected) then the Holocene must be regarded as over, finished (it will remain on the time scale, of course) and the Anthropocene will have carried on from it. If it is regarded as an Age (a lower rank unit) then the Anthropocene will simply be a subdivision of the Holocene. This question of hierarchical level is another part of the ongoing debate...

4:05
Gaia Vince: We're coming to the end of our time now - Jan and Erle are just answering some final questions

4:06
Comment From Anson Mackay
I was interested in the concept that the Bretton Woods meeting in 1944 being central to the great acceleration and impacts observed during the Anthropocene. Do you think that a future meeting of minds could ever be on the cards, e.g. to promote Great Transition Initiatives?
4:06
Erle Ellis: An excellent idea- and one that seems to be trying to become real- there have been a variety of international negotiations attempting to manage our negative impacts on the planet over the years. The fact that these have been largely unsuccessful in dealing with many of the big issues, like climate change, indicates that there is something missing here. I would propose that the focus on limiting human effects rather than focusing on the good things we can do that will benefit all of us, as was the emphasis in Bretton Woods- the level playing field so to speak- may be the reason. We need to work towards a global environment managed like the marketplace- aiming torwards a level playing field- for both current and future generations.
4:07
Comment From mart gross
Across the 5 previous mass extinctions of biodiversity, are there common correlates in the characteristics of taxa that did survive? For instance, were they smaller or larger in size, higher or lower in tropic levels, or particular phylogenies, etc? What do you predict for those that will survive the mass extinction of the Anthropocene? Will the characteristics be different or similar and why? Thank you.
4:07
Jan Zalasiewicz: In past mass extinctions, survivors were commonly small, and generalists, and that might well hold too, eventually. Currently, we are having a very distinctive effect on terrestrial vertebrates, for instance - converting many original species into just a few that dominate the planet - the animals that we eat and us (together over 90% of terrestrial vertebrate biomass). In the seas, by contrast, we are hunting out the biggest fish.
4:09
Comment From Chris Vernon
Given that one of the main archaeological signatures of this new geological period will be a layer of plastic, perhaps we should call it the Plasticene?! (Or will plastic not be long lived at all?)
4:09
Jan Zalasiewicz: There've been a few alternative names for the Anthropocene concept - including Homogenocene (for the effect on animal populations) - plastic might preserve quite well - as blackened carbonized outlines - they will give any far future palaeontologists quite a puzzle.
4:10
Comment From Jon Puritz
If this is the Anthropocene, do you think that Earth and Life sciences need to now include human impacts as essential elements. Should all results be interpreted in light of human induced changes?
4:10
Erle Ellis: Absolutely- this is the way we need to be going in education and research.

4:11
Gaia Vince: Thanks to Erle Ellis and Jan Zalaciewicz for a stimulating and thought-provoking debate, and thanks to everyone who joined us - there were too many questions for us to answer all of them. We'll be back in 2 weeks time for the next Live Chat, so do join us then.

And for more on the Anthropocene, read the Science feature article An Epoch Debate

[Six Foot Three]

Sorry as i'm not going to read the emtire length of your cut and paste posting however i do know what the Anthropocene is and i did read the last several paragraphs as i believe that they were stating about how ''plastics'' will be the new epoch layer following the 13,000 year old Holocene epoch correct?

If that's their assumption well i've never pondered about that before however not surprising as plastic is everywhere. We can still see the ''black mat'' from 12,900 b.c. when the comet exploded over north america killing off the large fauna creatures and forcing the Clovis peoples to morph into the Folsom culture peoples and so until nano tech can create plastics that dissolve over time not sure what you expect to be done in todays times since nearly everything is ''plastic''.

[Woof]

This thread is about the chat, and if you haven't read some of it - I don't think all of it would be necessary - then you shouldn't be assuming what it says and commenting.

[Brian.Pearson]

Originally Posted by 6 Foot 3

Sorry as i'm not going to read the emtire length of your cut and paste posting however i do know what the Anthropocene is and i did read the last several paragraphs as i believe that they were stating about how ''plastics'' will be the new epoch layer following the 13,000 year old Holocene epoch correct?

If that's their assumption well i've never pondered about that before however not surprising as plastic is everywhere. We can still see the ''black mat'' from 12,900 b.c. when the comet exploded over north america killing off the large fauna creatures and forcing the Clovis peoples to morph into the Folsom culture peoples and so until nano tech can create plastics that dissolve over time not sure what you expect to be done in todays times since nearly everything is ''plastic''.

I read an article about some plastics that dissolve and I even wrote a note to the city about it, but I never got a note back. Seems to me they would be more interested in saving money by slowing down the "fill factor" for the city dumps.

BTW, here's a little article about better weather predictions based upon a better idea of what UV is like at any given time:

Ultraviolet light shone on cold winter conundrum

[Woof]

Please don't hijack the thread.

[orogenicman]

I think we entered a new epoch at the beginning of the industrial revolution. We should name it the Weshouldhavecene.

[chuckmann]

Let me see if I understand this. Non geologists are taking it upon themselves to define a new geological era, and doing so by stepping outside of geology to so.

IIRC, the Holocene was defined by the end of the last great glaciation, a geologically significant event. We do not know if we are in an interglacial, with another glacial on its way, of if the 2.5 million year old ice age has permanently ended.

But here were are, with agenda driven non geologists attempting to hijack geology now. What next. It is settled science that Geology tells us that AGW aka climate change (another hijacked concept) is true?

Geology begins with rocks. You know, those things people should not throw if they live in glass houses. It is the study of studying the age of the earth, and takes years to define an age based upon worldwide alignment of sedimentary layers, as well as of catastrophic events placed within the context of those layers.

Lest anyone forget, the boundary of the K-M layers is defined by large concentrations of iridium, which led to the theory that a large asteroid (catastrophic event) was the defining characteristic of the end of the age of the dinosaurs. This, by the way, is still not settled science. There is another school of thought that says the dinos were on their way out anyway, and that said asteroid merely finished them off.

I'm at the beginnings of my own reading about this so called new period of the Anthropocene, but so far it seems to me to be just another ploy by the AGW crowd to hijack science and bend it to their political agendas.

[MJ7]

This was discussed at GSA a few years back, all geologists recognize the difference. If you aren't a geologist leave the science to the people that understand it.

[Woof]

Originally Posted by MJ7

This was discussed at GSA a few years back, all geologists recognize the difference. If you aren't a geologist leave the science to the people that understand it.

Could you expand on that a little?

[MJ7]

Originally Posted by Woof

Could you expand on that a little?

I tried to avoid this, but I'm a geologist. The geologic time scale is now shifting to more accurate dating methods, from what was previously used. It's all geochemistry (stuff I wouldn't expect anyone to understand, not even if they read countless books/articles on the matter). You have to get in the lab, sit your butt down on the stool and get to work on some super expensive equipment to understand all of this. A few years ago my friends and I would always joke about anthropogenic geologic layers in the future, and we called man-made things urban-ite. This of course will happen, the scale of which is unknown, the time scale currently is too short to know. The last little ice age wasn't all that long ago actually and is more current with the average life span, google the maunder minimum.