This is a good write-up, but I must confess that I dislike how most media discussion of the Anthropocene nowadays seems to overly focus on the search for the ‘golden spike’, which is actually beside the point for 99% of people. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-12-12/anthropocene-epoch-golden-spike-vote/101711314
1. Humans are a geological force. The signs of this fact are everywhere we look, and we urgently need to grapple with it.
2. This is so recent from a geological perspective that the rock record is only just starting to register this fact.
Both of these things are true. But the first is much more important: the decisions we make now determine our planet's geologic future.
Yet all the focus is the pettifogging debate over the second, and the implication that the Anthropocene is not 'real' unless and until everyone agrees on a single point where we can label it is really dangerous.
It's hard to draw a boundary on a transition you're in the middle of. Cockroach geologists millions of years hence will have to trouble discerning the signal our civilisation is generating in rocks forming right now. I'd be perfectly content to leave the golden spike to them.
https://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2012/06/drawing-sharp-boundaries-in-a-fuzzy-world/
@allochthonous Fully agree. I would add: if the golden spike is eventually fixed at a very recent date (e.g. the traces of the nuclear explosion), this could suggest that human disastrous environmental effects, and their political, economic and social causes, are very recent too. Would be a false and very bad message.
