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Humans have impacted the Earth so significantly with nuclear tests and plastic pollution that we’ve triggered the start of a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.

The Working Group on the Anthropocene (WGA) suggests that the starting date of the new geological epoch should be 1950 – the year when radioactive deposits from nuclear tests began to become part of the Earth’s crust. The group, which voted 30 to three in favour of formally designating the Anthropocene, presented its recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town.


Humans have also dramatically accelerated animal and plant extinction rates, left permanent traces of burnt fossil fuels in sediment and glacial ice and, through the use of fertilisers, doubled the amount of nitrogen in the Earth’s soil.

Plastic pollution is now so common that microplastic particles may well leave behind identifiable fossils for future generations. These changes are so significant, the researchers argue, that they signal the end of current 12,000-year-old Holocene epoch.

The Earth’s climate remained stable during the Holocene epoch, which saw the development of all of human civilisation. The international group of scientists that forms the WGA concluded that the changes to the Earth’s geology in recent years are significant enough to warrant the creation of a new geological epoch.

It is estimated that between 15 and 51 trillion microplastic particles have accumulated in the ocean The 5 Gyres Institute


To define a new epoch, scientists must find identify a ‘signal’ that is incorporated into rock deposits all over the world. The best candidate for the Anthropocene epoch is likely to be the spike in radioactive elements released from nuclear bomb tests in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Researchers from the WGA are now on the hunt for geological samples that will back up their recommendation and show that a distinct layer of sediment has formed since the 1950s.

Finding suitable samples could take two to three years, after which the WGA would put together a formal definition of the Anthropocene epoch to the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS). If the SQS agrees with the definition, the definition will be voted on by another commission before finally being ratified by the Executive Committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences. “If all of these conditions can be fulfilled, then the Anthropocene would become a formal part of the Geological Time Scale,” the WGA said.

The recommendation by the WGA backs up research from University College London last year which argued that humans had been living in the Anthropocene era since 1610. The study claims a dramatic drop in atmospheric CO2 levels around the turn of the 17th century was triggered by the arrival of Europeans in the Americas in 1492 as they triggered the death of around 50 million indigenous Americans, putting an end to farming on the continent.