Mercy me: Photos show what humans have done to the planet in the Anthropocene age
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Think hard enough and you may remember some of those scientific time markers we memorized in school, like the Jurassic period when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the Paleocene marking the dawn of primates. And now, over 60 million years later, should you be adding another name to the list? Well, the International Union of Geological Sciences thinks no, but Colin Waters thinks so. He's a retired geologist with the British Geological Survey and was recently head of the Anthropocene Working Group of the IUGS' International Commission on Stratigraphy. He joins us now. Welcome to the program.
COLIN WATERS: Hello.
RASCOE: So Anthropocene - pretend we're in science class and just give us just enough of a definition that we'll be able to remember it for a pop quiz next week.
WATERS: Well, the actual original term comes from a Nobel laureate called Paul Crutzen. He said we no longer live in the Holocene - the Holocene, being the last 10,700 years. It's the time when human civilizations developed and prospered, and we spread across the planet. And what he argued was that things like climate change, chemistry of the atmosphere and the oceans, how biodiversity is changing means that we no longer live in that comfortable zone that we know of the Holocene. And he came up with this term, the Anthropocene, which represents a fundamental change to the planet that we as humans have caused.
RASCOE: And so when does your group's research believe the Anthropocene began?
WATERS: The time where you do get this overwhelming change to the planet is actually a relatively small interval of time in the middle of the 20th century. It's something known as the Great Acceleration. It's where human populations suddenly jumped from this 2.5 billion that it was in 1950 through to the 8 billion people we have at present. But as geologists, we wanted to actually identify a specific marker that we could use to say, this would represent the point where we change from being the Holocene to the Anthropocene. And we use particularly as an isotope of plutonium, which is an extremely rare element on the planet, but has become commoner through the first thermonuclear detonations that happened in 1952. So that represents a marker that we can correlate across the entire planet. That happens within a year or so.
RASCOE: Just recently, this month, in fact, the IUGC though, declined a proposal to formalize the Anthropocene as a new epoch. What rationale did they give for rejecting the proposal?
WATERS: Well, actually, they haven't even been in touch with us yet to say they have rejected it or to provide any explanation as to why. We've had a number of critiques that they've provided, all of which we've addressed. Two of the commoner ones is to say, well, humans have always impacted on the planet, and there's nothing special about the present day. The data does not confirm that at all. And if you look at the variations of things like concentrations of things like carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, acidification in the oceans - these things - they have a certain range that occur naturally in the Holocene. We are well outside of those ranges now. And the likelihood is that these will maintain outside of that variation for many tens of thousands of years in the case of climate in particular. But the other thing is we're already seeing people saying, well, at least we don't need to worry about this now. Humans aren't having a big impact on the planet, so why should we worry about this? And so let's go to business as usual and carry on polluting the environment the way we have done in the past. It's a very negative aspect to come out of this rejection.
RASCOE: That's Colin Waters, former chair of the Anthropocene Working Group. Thank you so much for being with us.
WATERS: My pleasure.
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