[Rockhounds] The start of the Anthropocene: The atomic bomb marker inside your body

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

It's in your teeth. Your eyes and your brain too. Scientists call it the
"bomb spike" (or "bomb pulse") – and for more than half a century its
signature has been present inside the human body.

In the 1950s, there were so many nuclear bomb explosions above ground that
it transformed the chemical make-up of the atmosphere
<https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/isotopes/bombspike.html> – altering the carbon
composition of life on Earth ever since, along with oceans, sediments,
stalactites and more.

Unlike the direct radioactive fallout from the explosions, the bomb spike
is not harmful. In fact, it's proven surprisingly helpful for scientists in
recent years. Some have even gone so far as to describe it as the "mushroom
cloud's silver lining
<https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.321.5895.1434>".

Why? Evidence of the pulse is so ubiquitous that it can, among many other
insights, tell forensic scientists when a person was born (or died)
<https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1556-4029.14227>, provide
discoveries about the age of neurons
<https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674(13)00533-3> in our brains, reveal
the origin of poached wildlife
<https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/14c-bomb-peak-analysis-of-african-elephant-tusks-and-its-relation-to-cites/12052FC4261543FBC576B53EE45CF9A7>,
determine red wine vintage
<https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/bk-2011-1081.ch006> and even unlock
the true age of centuries-old sharks
<https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf1703> (see box: *"The bomb
spike's multiple uses"*).

And now it may also help to define a new geological era. In July, a group
of earth scientists recommended that its presence in a Canadian lake –
along with other human-made markers from the mid-20th Century – should
represent the official start of the Anthropocene
<https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66132769>.


https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230808-atomic-bomb-spike-carbon-radioactive-body-anthropocene