Simone Rotella
FROM rapid climate change to biodiversity loss, the Anthropocene marks our times as an age of human-caused planetary disruption. A working group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy now proposes to more precisely define the Anthropocene, a term originated by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000.
Using the methods that demark all units in Earth’s official history book, the geologic time scale, the group would define the Anthropocene as an epoch of geological time starting precisely in 1950, marked by plutonium isotopes from nuclear weapons fallout in the sediments of Crawford Lake in Canada.
People familiar with the term …
