Refer Report

We are living in the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago. It is the era when the glaciers that covered Western Europe and the eastern United States retreated and the Earth warmed. The Anthropocene is the claim that we have entered a new geological epoch. It was made in 2000 by Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and has been a topic of discussion among natural scientists, social scientists, and artists.

A new geological era is ratified by the International Union of Geological Sciences after a working group is formed under a subcommittee of the International Commission on Stratigraphy and after voting by the subcommittee and the International Commission on Stratigraphy. In the case of the Anthropocene, the ‘Anthropocene Working Group’ was formed under the Quaternary Subcommittee on Stratigraphy in 2009 and submitted a draft for the official recognition of the Anthropocene in October of last year. The draft set Crawford Lake in Canada as a kind of representative stratum, the ‘Global Standard Stratigraphic Area’ (GSSP), and considered 1952, when the concentration of artificial radioactive materials due to nuclear testing rapidly increased, as the starting point. However, this draft was rejected in the first hurdle, the Quaternary Commission vote, in March of this year.

Scientists from the Anthropocene Working Group attended the Busan Geological Sciences Congress last month and fiercely criticized the existing geological community, calling them “Anthropocene skeptics.” They countered that the Anthropocene began 72 years ago, a very short time compared to the traditional geologists’ concept of time, but that there is a lot of decisive evidence collected according to existing stratigraphic criteria. However, they criticized that it was put to a vote right away without any scientific discussion and that not a single report was produced. An article written by Professor Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester in the UK in the science journal New Scientist last June allows us to guess the background of this situation.

“I think[Anthropocene advocates]must have been very uncomfortable with the idea of ​​linking the quiet abstractions of geology to contemporary problems. New scientific knowledge always shakes old perspectives, so it is not surprising that the Anthropocene has met with resistance.”

Text and photos by Nam Jong-young, environmental nonfiction writer and director of the Climate Change and Animal Research Institute

Source: Korean