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Comment by lainga | Hacker News Reader

Geologists reject declaration of Anthropocene epoch

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/22/geologists-r...

This makes it sound like the designation is latent, even if rejected by committee right now. They acknowledge an anthropogenic "event" is under way but aren't admitting the anthropocene because of its recency and unclear boundaries.

But the boundaries of other epochs are also only estimated and didn't unfold completely overnight, not even for the K-Pg impactor, probably the most sudden change in the geological record. It still took thousands of years for the consequences to shake out into a steadier state.

If we were studying the current transition hundreds of thousands or millions of years from now starting with zero knowledge, the disappearance of megafauna (ongoing and has been for tens of thousands of years), the large scale transformation of forests to grassland, the invasion of species to every corner of the earth, the mass extinction most severely in the tropics and oceans, the appearance of so much carbon, plastic, and other pollution in the geologic record, and the disappearance of glaciers (tens of thousands of years to go there, even in worst case scenarios) would appear virtually instantaneous. There'd be error bounds on it but eventually no disagreement that the Earth took a corner.

So the argument starts to sound a bit like denial. But that's OK. We've been through lots of denial around whether extinction happens, if mass extinction happens, if the K-Pg impact happened, if it caused a mass extinction, or whether continents move around. All settled now.

> They acknowledge an anthropogenic "event" is under way but aren't admitting the anthropocene because of its recency and unclear boundaries.

You mean aren't admitting the anthropocene as an epoch? That's not what the article says. The reason it's not admissible as an epoch is because we might blow ourselves up tomorrow and wipe out industrial civilisation. And the whole layer of steel and concrete we laid down would be very thin in the record, like the K-Pg impact. The banded iron formations are kind of on the boundary, they're associated with the Great Oxygenation Event but you could also maybe call it the Jatulian period. That was a couple hundred million years.

> There'd be error bounds on it but eventually no disagreement that the Earth took a corner.

Those are classified as events, not epochs. The K-Pg impact was an event.

Ed. I guess you could also say why can't we have a new Anthropocene period caused by an Anthropocene event, but I don't know what to tell you, it's just confusing to do that. That's why the K-Pg impact is followed by the Danian age, not the The-Start-Of-This-Period-Has-A-Lot-Of-Iridium age. I don't get why the proposal didn't want to call it the Crawfordian if that's where the canonical marker is found

Besides, if we don't blow ourselves up, it's a virtual certainty that there will be another completely different geologic event in the next 100 years. And some completely different one on the following 100 years.

Hell, many of the changes from the current event are not even coherent with each other.

IMO, some people are just way too intent on pushing futurology around. (On something similar, people started pushing some grand event that would mark the end of the 20th century at the 80s. Of course, they pushed lots of different ones.)

The Great War, World War, Forever War.

Industrial, organic, traditional farming.

Toast vs merely warmed bread.

I'm fine with everyone landing on their own names. Provided each has some kind of preamble (context, assumptions, scope) and acknowledging everyone else has the same right(s) to add to the confusion.

Huh. That looks like really important context. I wonder why the Smithsonian article neglected to mention it. Do they just not want to admit that there's any dissent?

I think the proposing team ran out of options on the formal track so now they're going the ad-hominem track against the IUGS (they're uncomfortable with the Anthropocene, they're climate-change deniers, etc.)

They did mention it. The Smithsonian piece is a response to it. They even link to the same IUGS press release that the Guardian uses as a source.

The Smithsonian article specifically mentioned it right after the leading paragraphs that outlined what the distinguishing features were and that it had been put forward:

    The proposal was rejected by the international hierarchy of stratigraphy— of which the International Commission on Stratigraphy is a part— without citing substantive reasons, but most public criticisms of the Anthropocene stem from a range of sources: from within the heart of geology, to well outside it, among the social sciences and humanities.

It then goes on to address 10 points of dissent made and why these reasons are weak, misconstrued, not sufficient, etc.

Oh, my bad. I fail at reading. Thanks for the corrections.

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