Looking back at the Anthropocene

Hi, future geologists. Maybe you’ve stumbled across some million-year old writings that dismissed the idea of an Anthropocene Epoch. Yeah, you’re puzzled because that is a pretty solid division of time from your perspective…of course you also got rid of this Holocene/Pleistocene boundary too, because, really? The Holocene is hardly more than a small burp within the Pleistocene, at least that fragment not in the Anthropocene.

Those old writings focus on whether the line for the Anthropocene was when the first megafauna perished in Europe or Australia or North America. Or when forests were cleared for farming. Or when Roman smelters first led lead to waft into the Arctic. Or when carbon isotopes got really strange, or elements that should have been off the edge of the periodic table showed up. Or when calcite started dissolving at shallower depths in the ocean. From your end of the temporal telescope, this is all rounding error stuff. After all, the extinction event at this time was one of the biggest ever. Sure it took a few years; most of these sorts of things do, so those old arguments seem rather trivial disagreements.

Of course, the arguments in these old writings is about the Anthropocene Epoch, but you have the Anthropocene Era, a higher level distinction. Or maybe you prefer Anthropozoic, as after all, the big extinction events bounded the Mesozoic on each end and it seems these Eras like to be “-zoic”s. Of course your name is likely different. After all, the Cenozoic, the “Age of Mammals” is not the “Age of Chicxulub” or “Age of Deccan Traps”, so probably this Era shouldn’t be the “Age of Humans”…but from our end, it is hard to know who the winners will be.

So kind of just was well we didn’t adopt that Anthropocene title.