[Rockhounds] The Anthropocene Is a Joke

[Dora Smith]

Can you all take your "thoughtful" politics off list!

Dora Smith

On 8/14/19 6:17 PM, Tim Fisher wrote:
> That certainly is some food for thought. They do bring up the Holocene, which is also rather presumptuous. Also I didn't read the whole thing but arbitrary division of geologic time periods would naturally result in shorter units as our resolution increases. If you extend the logic farther the Anthropocene began with Homo sapiens. Or H. erectus. or Australopithecus. Or....
>
> Tim Fisher
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rockhounds [mailto:rockhounds-bounces at rockhounds.drizzle.com] On Behalf Of Kreigh Tomaszewski
> Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2019 12:50 PM
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> Subject: [Rockhounds] The Anthropocene Is a Joke
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> 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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