Jan 8 2023 - Anthropocene this year

 

"Researchers will soon announce their choice of a site to serve as the “golden spike” for the Anthropocene epoch, a controversial proposal to designate an official geological span of time marked by humanity’s indelible effects on the planet. The Anthropocene Working Group,  assembled by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, already picked the 1950s,  an era of surging fossil fuel use, as the start of the epoch. And the group has reviewed 12 candidate sites around the world that contain lake muds, ice cores, or other features that clearly document the shift in emissions and could be used to formally define the new epoch. After the working group announces its choice, three more committees will have to approve it. Should the definition be voted down, it cannot be reconsidered for 10 years. Passage is far from guaranteed. Many geologists acknowledge the unprecedented changes wrought by human activity but question the need to change a system that describes millions of years of geologic time to mark shorter lived events driven by humanity." "Some of the strongest candidates come from lake bottoms that accumulate muds in thin annual layers, creating high-resolution records. Crawford Lake in Canada’s Ontario province, only some 200 meters wide but 25 meters deep, is one. In cores of mud from the lake, changes seen since the 1950s stand out vividly, including the bomb spike and an “off the charts” increase in soot from local industry, says Francine McCarthy, a micro-paleontologist at Brock University. “We have a really ideal site,” she says." Today's flower in the Niagara Falls Greenhouse is the beautiful Clerodendron. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

I didn't know what epoch it was, then I met you

This news just in from the Guardian: The Anthropocene epoch:  scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age "Humanity’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared, according to an official expert group who presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town on Monday. The new epoch should begin about 1950, the experts said, and was likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, although an array of other signals, including plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chicken were now under consideration. The current epoch, the Holocene, is the 12,000 years of stable climate since the last ice age during which all human civilisation developed. But the striking acceleration since the mid-20th century of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the global mass extinction of species, and the transformation of land by deforestation and development mark the end of that slice of geological time, the experts argue. The Earth is so profoundly changed that the Holocene must give way to the Anthropocene." And so our images today are of the 'spring' of our new age.