[Rockhounds] The Anthropocene Is a Joke

[Andrew Turner]

I thought this was a fascinating article and completely worthy to be posted on this site.  It was a bit political, but really didn't take a side.  In fact, the basic synopsis was that it really doesn't matter what we think about climate change, nuclear warfare, effect of human impact, etc., overall our entire existence will eventually become an insignificant layer in geologic history of the planet.  Going through "recent" geologic history to show that we have seen far greater changes in the past and likely will in the future as well as illustrating the incredible time frames involved with certain events was extremely educational.  It also asks the question about whether there may have been more intelligent life in the past or might be in the future (however that may look).  Although I find the comment about dinosaurs mining asteroids comical, it was the general idea that was intriguing.

Now, you can obviously disagree with everything presented in the article, especially concerning the overall impact of humans on the earth in such a short period of time.  But, overly political, it is not.  However, as a geologist, it really helped explain what the earth has gone through and how it rebounded from very catastrophic events in the past.  I will definitely share this with my family as it is a good read regardless of your (or mine) leanings.

Andrew Turner, PG
Salt Lake City, UT

________________________________
From: Rockhounds <rockhounds-bounces at rockhounds.drizzle.com> on behalf of Dora Smith <tiggernut24 at yahoo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2019 3:09 PM
To: rockhounds at rockhounds.drizzle.com <rockhounds at rockhounds.drizzle.com>
Subject: Re: [Rockhounds] The Anthropocene Is a Joke

This is a political argument and not appropriate here.

The notion of the anthropocene rests on the notion that humans have had
an entirely destructive impact on our planet.???? If not, then the term
has no meaning.???? Humans have been intelligent enough to have any impact
on their environment for only a half a million years!?? The term
certainly has no geological meaning!

Dora


On 8/14/19 2:50 PM, Kreigh Tomaszewski wrote:
> Humans are now living in a new geological epoch of our own making: the
> Anthropocene. Or so we???re told. Whereas some epochs in Earth history
> stretch more than 40 million years, this new chapter started maybe 400
> years ago, when carbon dioxide dipped by a few parts per million in the
> atmosphere. Or perhaps, as a panel of scientists voted earlier this year
> <https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01641-5?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=4037068ff3-briefing-dy-20190522>,
> the epoch started as recently as 75 years ago, when atomic weapons began to
> dust the planet with an evanescence of strange radioisotopes.
>
> These are unusual claims about geology, a field that typically deals with
> mile-thick packages of rock stacked up over tens of millions of years,
> wherein entire mountain ranges are born and weather away to nothing within
> a single unit of time, in which extremely precise rock dates???single-frame
> snapshots from deep time???can come with 50,000-year error bars, a span
> almost 10 times as long as all of recorded human history. If having an
> epoch shorter than an error bar seems strange, well, so is the Anthropocene.
>
>
> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arrogance-anthropocene/595795/
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