The quest to declare the Anthropocene an official geological epoch has fallen into epic controversy after the validity of a leaked vote that apparently invalidated the proposal was questioned.
Supporters of the idea have been working on the proposal for 15 years. They argue that it will formalize the undeniable and irreversible changes that human activity has brought to the planet. It will mark the end of the Holocene, the 11,700-year period of stable global environment during which human civilization as a whole developed.
Opponents argue that pinpointing the beginning of human age at a specific date fails to recognize the long history of anthropogenic change, for example through agriculture.
The proposal set a date for the start of the Anthropocene in 1952, marked by the global fallout of plutonium from nuclear weapons tests. A new era also requires a specific location to represent change, and in July they chose sediments collected from a sunken lake in Canada.
But the geology committee, the Subcommittee on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), voted in February and the proposal died by a 12-4 vote, according to a New York Times report. The SQS chairman then said the “alleged” vote was “in violation of statutory rules” and called for an investigation into the matter.
The chair of the International Stratigraphic Commission, which oversees the SQS, told Nature that the proposal “cannot proceed any further”, making formal adoption of the Anthropocene unlikely.
If the vote is confirmed, a new proposal could be submitted. In any case, the concept of the Anthropocene is already widely used to explain humanity's earth-altering impact.
Another suggestion might be to declare the Anthropocene a geological “event”. They do not require committee approval because they occur over time and are not part of the official geological timescale. The mass extinction and oxygenation of the atmosphere 2 billion years ago is called an event.
“Human influence goes back much deeper in geological time,” says SQS member Professor Mike Walker of Trinity St David's, University of Wales. “If you ignore that, you're ignoring the real impact, the real impact, that humans have on the planet.”
However, Professor Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester, who chairs the SQS committee, said: 'The alleged vote was taken in breach of ICS law. Other important rules were included to ensure the process. [leak] It exposed SQS, and by default its parent scientific community, to the potential for considerable reputational damage. ”
Zalasiewicz, supported by one of the SQS vice-chairs, said he had called for an investigation “including the introduction of procedures to invalidate presumptive votes.”
Philip Gibbard, an SQS member from the University of Cambridge, told Nature that the core of the annulment challenge was a challenge to the voting process starting on February 1, which the rest of the committee had hoped to move forward with. Told. Sour grapes are grown here. ”
Professor Colin Waters, chair of the Anthropocene working group that developed the proposal, told the Guardian:Holocene interglacial conditions [and] That the change is irreversible. ”
“The Anthropocene strata are also different from the Holocene strata,” Waters said. most of which show a sharp increase in the mid-20th century.
“The Anthropocene, although currently short, is of sufficient scale and importance to be expressed on geological time scales,” he said. “We will continue to discuss this matter and would not be surprised if there were calls to reconsider the proposal in the future.”
