Well scientists want to know.

Crawford Lake in Canada voted 'golden spike' site to determine Anthropocene epoch.

A small lake near the Canada-US border has been chosen as the site that may define the start of a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene.

The spot — named Crawford Lake — was picked from a list of a dozen contenders by a panel called the Anthropocene Working Group, who announced their decision at the International Congress on Stratigraphy in Lille overnight.

The vote is the culmination of a three-year project to find the most suitable site, Colin Waters, chair of the working group, said.

It's also one step closer to confirming that Earth has entered a new epoch — one triggered by burning fossil fuels, nuclear bomb tests and other human activity.

The current epoch, the Holocene, started roughly 11,700 years ago. As seen in climate signatures from cores drilled from a Greenland icesheet, it's when the planet started warming after the relatively chilly Pleistocene.

The idea that humans have forced changes to the planet so substantive that we've shifted into a new epoch was first popularised by the late Dutch chemist and Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen in 2000.

He proposed the term "Anthropocene" — derived from the Greek "anthropo" for "man" and "cene" for "new" — at a conference.

The reaction, Jürgen Renn from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthroplogy in Germany said, was "very intense".

"It pointed to these global impacts of humanity ... it's not just about climate change. It's not just biodiversity loss. It's not just ... that humans are moving. It's all of this together.".......

Cheers.

I thought we were in an epoch change. Anthroposophy calls it the Post Atlantic Culture period, in the sign of Pisces.

---

Music
Pictures