Us Homo Sapiens (or humans) have had the biggest impact of any living creature on planet Earth. Some of the changes we have made to our planet will last hundreds of thousands of years, many could even be irreversible! The dinosaurs lived in the Mesozoic Era, the glaciers rolled over the world in the Pleistocene Epoch. These changes in eras and epochs are made because of major geological events on Earth that make each period unrecognizable from the last.
The Anthropocene is a proposed era of time that suggests that humanity's changes on our Earth are a big enough change that it should create a new geographical era in our geological timeline. There have been many debates about this topic as creating a new point of time in geography is no easy task, but scientists have varied perspectives on this topic making it almost impossible to solidify our time on Earth.
So have humans made enough of an impact on Earth to create the Anthropocene? Should we consider our nuclear, technological, and artificial advances a new geographic era? Making the Anthropocene an era in human history can be detrimental to practical implications as humanity should be trying to fix the damage we have caused our planet. Making our destruction into an era seems a bad way to show that we are working towards solving the problem.
Some critics argue that making the Anthropocene an epoch also undermines the credibility of other existing eras and epochs as the Anthropocene revolves around humanity's innovation and destruction of our planet. At the same time, other eras lean more towards natural disasters, natural selection, and geological changes over hundreds of millions of years. This means the Anthropocene will contradict our current basis of creating eras.
Another perspective on the Anthropocene isn’t debated among scientists, but rather geologists who are trying to determine if humans have had a lasting impact on the rocks beneath our feet, as this is how to determine if humanity's impact will survive hundreds, thousands or even millions of years. Rocks are one of the best ways to tell geological eras apart, as a change in rock is a change in Earth itself. Which is how eras and epochs differentiate.
Obviously, since geological times do not change easily, timekeepers need to decide when the Anthropocene should start. There have been many propositions on when it should start but researchers must take into consideration that the start should be a time period that completely changed the face of the Earth (naturally or through human innovation) for millions of years.
The main argument is to begin the epoch during the beginning of the industrial revolution when humanity began building machines. But is this time period really that impactful? Will it last a million years? Another proposed start time is when plastic began filling up landfills in the early 20th century because geologists think this was when humanity really started destroying our planet. One research paper even proposed starting the epoch on July 16, 1945, when the first nuclear bomb was detonated in New Mexico.
In conclusion, the creation of the Anthropocene has been an interesting debate that has gone on for many years. Some scientists believe that humanity has changed Earth enough while others believe that we as humans shouldn’t be able to create an epoch for changes that we created, destroying our own planet. Believing in the Anthropocene is opinionated but you can be sure to expect huge changes to our geological timeline in the near future as hundreds of research papers are released every week with insight on the topic.
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