![]() But it can also serve to inflate humanity’s legacy on an ever-churning planet that will quickly destroy-or conceal forever-even our most awesome creations. For those invested in the stratigraphic arcana of this infinitesimal moment in time, it serves as a useful catalog of our junk. ![]() The idea of the Anthropocene is an interesting thought experiment. Read: The cataclysmic break that (maybe) occurred in 1950Ī Climate Catastrophe Paved the Way for the Dinosaurs’ Reign Peter Brannen If 100 million years can easily wear the Himalayas flat, what chance will San Francisco or New York have? Very little of our handiwork will survive the obliteration of the ages. But despite this incredible effort, all is vanity. Each year we spew more than 100 times as much CO 2 into the air as volcanoes do, and we’re currently overseeing the biggest disruption to the planet’s nitrogen cycle in 2.5 billion years. And, yes, we’re currently warping the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans violently, and in ways that have analogues in only a few terrifying chapters buried deep in Earth’s history. So what to make of this new “epoch” of geological time? Do we deserve it? Sure, humans move around an unbelievable amount of rock every year, profoundly reshaping the world in our own image. ![]() If having an epoch shorter than an error bar seems strange, well, so is the Anthropocene. These are unusual claims about geology, a field that typically deals with mile-thick packages of rock stacked up over tens of millions of years, wherein entire mountain ranges are born and weather away to nothing within a single unit of time, in which extremely precise rock dates-single-frame snapshots from deep time-can come with 50,000-year error bars, a span almost 10 times as long as all of recorded human history. Or perhaps, as a panel of scientists voted earlier this year, the epoch started as recently as 75 years ago, when atomic weapons began to dust the planet with an evanescence of strange radioisotopes. Whereas some epochs in Earth history stretch more than 40 million years, this new chapter started maybe 400 years ago, when carbon dioxide dipped by a few parts per million in the atmosphere. H umans are now living in a new geological epoch of our own making: the Anthropocene.
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