Geology's Timekeepers Are Feuding - The Atlantic - 0 views
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, in 2000, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen won permanent fame for stratigraphy. He proposed that humans had so throughly altered the fundamental processes of the planet—through agriculture, climate change, and nuclear testing, and other phenomena—that a new geological epoch had commenced: the Anthropocene, the age of humans.
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Zalasiewicz should know. He is the chair of the Anthropocene working group, which the ICS established in 2009 to investigate whether the new epoch deserved a place in stratigraphic time.
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In 2015, the group announced that the Anthropocene was a plausible new layer and that it should likely follow the Holocene. But the team has yet to propose a “golden spike” for the epoch: a boundary in the sedimentary rock record where the Anthropocene clearly begins.
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