Yesterday, the Anthropocene Working Group proposed that the “golden spike” for the Anthropocene should be symbolically driven into a sediment core extracted from Crawford Lake in Ontario. A “golden spike” is a point in the stratigraphic column that serves as the official marker for the start of a time period, in this case, the proposed (but not yet ratified) Anthropocene epoch. The Anthropocene has been controversial, for reasons previously debated on this very blog. I find myself in sympathy with what Jacquelyn Gill recently told a reporter from Nature:
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.”
Still, others maintain that the ratification of the Anthropocene is a matter of political importance, and moreover, that failure to ratify it might have undesirable political consequences. (See the linked article from friend of the blog Hernán Bobadilla.)
More on this to come… [Update: here]