14 DAY TRIAL // Leading scientists in a variety of fields gathered in London last week, to attend a one-day symposium organized by the British Geological Society. The participants agreed that human technology is leaving behind tracks on the planet, which will be visible even 10 million years in the future.
They say that we are currently producing the negative equivalent of the Cambrian Explosion, which was a massive speciation event that occurred about 530 million years ago. During this time, most of the phyla, including animals, phytoplankton, and calcimicrobes, appeared on Earth.
Now, all this time later, humans have become the only species on the surface of the planet that can change the latter's morphology, chemistry and biology directly. The layers of rock and sediment that are currently accumulating will carry with them these signs, experts say.
The current age we're in is dubbed by many the Anthropocene. The word “anthropo” means human, or human-induced. In other words, this is the age of human influence, where greenhouse gas emissions change the composition of the atmosphere, triggering ecosystemic collapse and other effects.
Paul Crutzen, the winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, says that it's high time the Holocene Epoch is officially ended. The expert, one of the world's top-most atmospheric chemists, is based at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry Department of Atmospheric Chemistry, in Germany.
He also conducts work at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD) Scripps Institution of Oceanography and at the Seoul National University, in South Korea, Daily Galaxy reports.
The expert is best known for his work on ozone depletion, but he proposed that humanity is responsible for changes in the planet's ecology and geology more than a decade ago.
“To assign a more specific date to the onset of the 'anthropocene" seems somewhat arbitrary, but we propose the latter part of the 18th century, although we are aware that alternative proposals can be made (some may even want to include the entire holocene),” the expert explains.
“However, we choose this date because, during the past two centuries, the global effects of human activities have become clearly noticeable,” he goes on to say.
“This is the period when data retrieved from glacial ice cores show the beginning of a growth in the atmospheric concentrations of several 'greenhouse gases", in particular CO2 and CH4. Such a starting date also coincides with James Watt's invention of the Steam engine in 1784,” Crutzen explains.
Numerous experts and specialists in a variety of fields other than geology agree with Crutzen. They argue that the amount of modifications we brought to the planet's atmosphere, oceans and soils are enough to merit a new classification.