8/30/2023 0 Comments Golden spike definition![]() ![]() For those of you interested in this, a good place to start is this old post jointly authored by Adrian Currie and Derek Turner. (My friend Hernán Bobadilla recently published an article in Philosophy of Science that makes this very argument, and it is well worth your time and attention.)Īnyway, my purpose here is not to weigh in on the scientific controversy surrounding the Anthropocene. Still, many thoughtful people disagree, arguing that the ratification of the Anthropocene is a matter of political importance, and that failure to ratify it might have undesirable political consequences. The work to define an age of human impacts has taken “a tremendous amount of effort, to solve a problem that I don’t think exists” … “We all already know what we mean when we say the Anthropocene.” I sympathize with Jacquelyn Gill’s view, expressed in the Nature news write-up: Like everything having to do with the Anthropocene, the announcement stirred strong feelings. A “golden spike” is a point in the stratigraphic column that serves as the official marker for the start of a time interval-in this case, the proposed Anthropocene Epoch. Some prominent IUGS members argue that it is too soon to formalise a new epoch - alternative suggestions include defining the Anthropocene as an Age in the ongoing Holocene epoch, or just labelling it as a loosely-defined geological event.Earlier this week, members of a special working group proposed that the “golden spike” for the Anthropocene be symbolically driven into a sediment core extracted from Crawford Lake in Ontario. It must obtain 60% approval from two other geological committees, and then be approved by the large and conservative International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), which will probably vote on it at the next International Geological Congress, in South Korea in August 2024. Crawford Lake is so special because it allows us to see at annual resolution the changes in Earth history”.ĭespite the strong evidence collected by the AWG, official acceptance of the Anthropocene as a new epoch in the Geological Time Scale is far from certain. It took three rounds of voting, which shows how closely matched the candidates were, but the AWG finally selected Crawford Lake as the location that best represents the start of the Anthropocene epoch.įrancine McCarthy, a geologist at nearby Brock University and member of the AWG told The Guardian that there is now “compelling evidence globally of a massive shift, a tipping point, in the Earth’s system. Most of the site teams identified the presence of plutonium as the primary indicator of the beginning of the Anthropocene. This analytical exercise has hence emphasised the stratigraphic reality of the Anthropocene, as well as providing the factual basis for formal definition. “All sites examined, from widely varying and globally distributed environments, include or delimit an interval that may be clearly referred to the Anthropocene … usually on the basis of multiple stratigraphic signals. As AWG Chair Colin Waters and colleagues wrote recently, the sites were not only all strong GSSP candidates, they clearly showed that a new global epoch began in the mid-20th century. Image: Anthropocene Review, February 2023Ĭrawford Lake was one of 12 locations submitted by Earth System scientists around the world for consideration by the Anthropocene Working Group as a possible Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), colloquially known as a “golden spike”. ![]() Short List: 12 locations were considered as possible 'Golden Spikes' to define the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch. ![]() To ensure that future scientists can study the evidence, a frozen sediment core from Crawford Lake is stored in the Canadian Museum of Nature’s National Biodiversity Cryobank. ![]() Interviewed by The Washington Post, British geologist Colin N Waters, chair of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), called the division is “a very precise geochemical boundary that is present across the planet, across all environments”. None of that existed until well after World War II: the layers mark a clear division between the end of the Holocene epoch and the beginning of the Anthropocene. A multidisciplinary scientific team that calls itself “Team Crawford” has found carbon particles from high energy power production, plutonium-239 from nuclear bomb tests, nitrates from massive application of chemical fertilisers, and other recent pollutants including indicators of decades of acid rain. Rich countries owe US$192 trillion in climate reparations to global Southįrozen cores pulled from the lake bottom since 2019 (see video below) also show distinct layers that have formed since the middle of the 20th century. ![]()
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