Leicester, The Anthropocene became part of the zeitgeist after Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen launched the idea in 2000. This is the notion that a crescendo of human impacts has recently propelled the Earth out of the relatively stable climatic conditions of the Holocene epoch, during which human civilisation developed and flourished, to produce a new kind of planet.
Then, the idea seemingly crashed to earth in 2024 when the International Commission on Stratigraphy rejected its incorporation into the official geological timescale. One details the evidence presented in our 2023 proposal to make the Anthropocene a new formal epoch: evidence then scrutinised in closed session by the geological bodies sitting in judgment, but only now published in peer-reviewed form. Over a hundred lines of evidence, from 12 exhaustively studied locations around the world, show that, geologically, the Anthropocene is rock solid. The Earth really did change, as an interconnected system, in the mid-20th century; and a level dated to 1952, when the first thermonuclear blast spread plutonium particles worldwide, marks an effective geological boundary for this new time interval.
Once the stuff of sci-fi, these symptoms are now real and won’t disappear – they’re ever more a matter of life and death for millions of people.
These are all aspects of the so-called “great acceleration”: the rapid growth, since the mid-20th-century, of population, industrialisation and globalisation that transformed humanity’s impact on the Earth. So where are we now? Has our planet not changed? Is the Anthropocene idea dead? One can be forgiven for being confused. But the Anthropocene was never only a question of what to call a chunk of geological time. The planet we live on is becoming hotter, more polluted, biologically degraded and its surface and underground increasingly reshaped by human activities. We and our co-authors have just published two articles in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment that explore these questions from different angles. The evidence presented was not disputed. The official rejection was instead over whether a geological epoch – usually measured in millions of years – should be declared after just seven decades. Our second study looks beyond this question of formal geological status, charting the Anthropocene as an idea that is still spreading and making waves. In recent years, dedicated institutes and networks have sprung up in Stockholm, Jena, Vienna, Daejeon and Beijing. And their strength lies in bringing different disciplines together, where the social sciences and humanities are as – or more – important than the Earth sciences. In the Anthropocene, this stability no longer holds: melting sea ice, rising seas and eroding coasts are altering the geography on which some of those rules were based. Legal scholars are having to devise new ways of adapting international law, aimed at upholding rights and keeping the peace on a fast-evolving planet. To prepare us all for the challenges ahead, educationalists are designing curricula that can allow students, present and future, to cope with a world where many old certainties no longer hold.
