

Some earth scientists are pushing to enshrine officially a decades-old idea — that Earth is now in a biogeochemical era of our own making that should be distinguished from the Holocene, the epoch that began with the end of the last ice age.

They say the new period should be called the Anthropocene epoch — a name proposed in 2000 by Paul J. Crutzen, the atmospheric chemist (now at the University of California, San Diego) who shared a Nobel Prize for work on human-caused damage to the ozone layer, and Eugene F. Stoermer of the University of Michigan.

The proposal to move forward with this idea has come in a paper in the journal GSA Today by Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams, geologists at the University of Leicester in England, along with colleagues at the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London.

A news release from the university explains the latest proposal:

“They have identified human impact through phenomena such as: Transformed patterns of sediment erosion and deposition worldwide; major disturbances to the carbon cycle and global temperature; wholesale changes to the world’s plants and animals; ocean acidification. “The scientists said their findings present the scholarly groundwork for consideration by the International Commission on Stratigraphy for formal adoption of the Anthropocene as the youngest epoch of, and most recent addition to, the Earth’s geological timescale. “They state: ‘Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene — currently a vivid yet informal metaphor of global environmental change — as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization by international discussion.’”

I explored this notion back in 1992, in “Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast” — my first book on global warming (long since out of print). Not being versed in Greek, I goofed a bit on the parlance, but you get the idea:

Perhaps earth scientists of the future will name this new post-Holocene era for its causative element — for us. We are entering an age that might someday be referred to as, say, the Anthrocene. After all, it is a geological age of our own making. The challenge now is to find a way to act that will make geologists of the future look upon this age as a remarkable time, a time in which a species began to take into account the long-term impact of its actions. The alternative may be to leave a legacy of irresponsibility and neglect of the biosphere that could eventually manifest itself in the fossil record as just one more mass extinction — like the record of bones and footprints left behind by the dinosaurs. *

Despite my linguistic lapse, my proposal made it into the Wikipedia entry on Anthropocene. The idea, of course, goes much farther back in time, with one intellectual stepping stone laid down more than 60 years ago by the Russian scientist Vladimir I. Vernadsky, who wrote: “Mankind taken as a whole is becoming a powerful geological force.”

A new translation of his essays, “Geochemistry and the Biosphere” (Synergetic Press) is worth scanning for more of his prescient thinking, which took the idea forward toward what he called “noösphere,” or Earth becoming a “planet of the mind” (some see hints of the World Wide Web and Google Earth in all of this).

As he put it: “Mankind’s power is connected not with its matter but with its brain, its thoughts and its works, guided by its mind. In the geological history of the biosphere, a great future is opened to Man if he realizes it and does not direct his mind and work to self-destruction.”

In a 2002 special report, I went into more depth on this uncomfortable situation for Homo sapiens — which, as far as we can tell, is the first species to become a planet-scale powerhouse and be aware of it (photosynthesizing organisms transformed the atmosphere, too, but most likely didn’t know it).

[* I recently doublechecked my old electronic version of the book text against the final printed version and adjusted here to get it precisely right.]