Anthropocene… Hun… What?

Anthropocene…

: the period of time during which human activities have had an environmental impact on the Earth regarded as constituting a distinct geological age

Okay so what about it?

Well I stumbled over an article about and you know me with science.

Canada’s Crawford Lake could mark the beginning of the Anthropocene

The proposed geologic epoch denotes when humans began profoundly changing the planet

Science News

By McKenzie Prillaman

July 11, 2023

Scientists are one step closer to defining a new chapter in geology, one in which humans have become the dominant driver of Earth’s climate and environment.

Out of 12 locations around the world, Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada, has been selected as the site that would mark the official beginning of the Anthropocene, a proposed geologic epoch starting in the 1950s, researchers announced at a July 11 news conference during the Max Planck Society Conference for a Sustainable Anthropocene in Berlin.

The lake bottom’s sediments hold one of the most precise records of humans’ alteration of Earth, including upticks in plutonium from nuclear weapons testing, ash from burning fossil fuels as well as heavy metals and microplastics.

But the Anthropocene isn’t an official geologic epoch yet. Now, several more committees must approve of the proposed epoch before it can be added to the geologic time scale. Doing so would end the nearly 12,000-year-old Holocene Epoch, which encompasses the rise of humankind since the last ice age.

Scientists first started using the term Anthropocene in the early 2000s to refer to the ongoing time of humans altering the planet on a global scale. Although framed in terms of geology, the Anthropocene lacked a formal geologic definition.

Okay what got my attention was… “plutonium from nuclear weapons testing” it is not just lake beds where that has happened.

You can tell steel from before and after the 1950s because of the plutonium! When they need steel that does not have low level radiation they have to got back to steel made before 1945.

Jump forward to July 16, 1945. The first nuclear bomb test was set off in New Mexico. For the first time, human-generated radiation enters the atmosphere. With the huge proliferation in nuclear tests across the mid-20th century, background radiation in the air went up worldwide… and when that air was blown through pig iron, the radioactive contamination got into the steel. Don’t panic! The levels of radiation in the atmosphere peaked in 1963 and has gone down every year since. But all steel made since 1945 has some level of background radiation effectively baked into it.

This is not a problem for most uses of steel. Sometimes, though, you really need steel without that radioactive contamination. Geiger counters, which measure radiation levels, are a good example. If you make a Geiger counter out of contaminated steel the instrument will pick up its own radiation. Many medical instruments need to detect radiation at very refined levels – so they cannot be made out of this steel either. What’s the solution? Easy, you find steel that was made before all this radioactive contamination.

Wood stove ash is radioactive enough to set off alarm bells at a nuclear power plant!

"While cleaning ashes from his fireplace two years ago, Stewart A. Farber mused that if trees filter and store airborne pollutants, they might also harbor fallout from the nuclear weapons tests of the 1950s and 1960s. On a whim, he brought some of his fireplace ash to Yankee Atomic Electric Companies' environmental lab in Boston, Mass., where he manages environmental monitoring. Farber says he was amazed to discover that his sample showed the distinctive cesium and strontium 'signatures' of nuclear fallout-and that the concentration of radioactivity "was easily 100 times greater than anything (our Lab) had ever seen in an environmental sample."

We don’t need a swamp in Canada to tell us how we have f**ked up the planet.

Before and after Chernobyl.

Before and after Fukushima Daiichi.

Ten thousand years from now you will be able to date things by analyzing the radioactive spectrum of trace elements.

But it not just radioactive materials…

Before and after PFAS the forever chemical!

Before and after “microplastics!”

And probably between now and then there will be other “Ops… I didn’t think of that!”

From coral to ice to peat, each of the candidate sites holds a remarkable record of human activity in its layers. Selecting Crawford Lake was “like choosing a favorite child,” says Turner, secretary and a voting member of the committee.

Among the locations, Crawford Lake’s muddy layers have trapped one of the most precise histories of human activity. Each summer, the water’s pH and warm temperatures cause mineral crystals to form near the top of the water. The crystals fall to the lake’s bottom like snow, where they lay undisturbed. “You get these lovely stripes,” Turner says. “And you can resolve what year [they’re from] pretty much by counting backwards from the surface layer, like a tree ring.”

Yup, we f**ked it up royally!

I worry about my grandnieces and grandnephews what will the world be like that we are handing them?