This made him an obvious choice to lead the Working Group, which he did until 2020. "It's a very abrupt change, and it's not a comfortable one."īut Zalasiewicz only has himself to blame.Īlready in the late 1990s, he was intrigued by what human civilization's fossil record might look like, leading to his first book in 2008, "Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?" "Plunging into the Anthropocene, I hit all of this messy, complicated human life," he added. You learn to live in the past," he said in an interview. "When I started geology, it was very much an escape from the complications of the world. Nine sites are on the short list to be Ground zero of Anthropocene's 'golden spike' Zalasiewicz's 15-years-and-counting Anthropocene odyssey was not what he signed up for. On Tuesday, the Working Group will announce which of nine candidate sites will get the "golden spike" signifying its status as ground zero for the Anthropocene. Zalasiewicz pointed to an "embarrassment of riches" of evidence locked in ice cores, sediment and coral skeletons: microplastics, forever chemicals, traces of invasive species, greenhouse gases, and the fallout from nuclear bombs.
The working group has already concluded that the geological record shows a clear rupture in the stability of the Holocene epoch that began 11,700 years ago, and that it occurred around the middle of the 20th century. "I was ambushed by the Anthropocene, and then kidnapped without hope of release," he told AFP in an interview.
Zalasiewicz was tapped in 2009 by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS)-guardians of the timescale dividing Earth's history into segments such as the Jurassic and Cretaceous-to chair a working group on the issue. For three decades the British scientist was, in his words, an itinerant geologist.īut then, curiosity and happenstance thrust him into the middle of a raging debate within science and beyond as to whether human activity and appetites have tilted our planet into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene.
0 kommentar(er)
